In today’s blog article, we will show you how you can insert and link a picture of a web site into your PowerPoint slide. Often, we are asked to display weather maps or traffic maps on an information screen. We will show you the easy steps on how to do this.
Let’s use a web site that shows an information about hurricanes. Open your internet browser and visit the National Hurricane Center at http://nhc.noaa.gov. Then you will see an image with the current hurricane information and warnings. This could also be a Doppler weather map. You can use any image. The owner of the website is regularly updating this image, to reflect the latest situation. For hurricanes, but this could be real-time traffic information as well.
We will start with this initial presentation. There are some titles and there is some room for our internet image.
The copy-paste method
Let us first demonstrate the easiest way to copy an image for our PowerPoint slide. Right click on the desired image on the web page and choose Copy picture from the pop up menu. Note that this here, is for the Microsoft Edge browser and this might vary, based on the internet browser that you are using. The image is now copied into memory.
Back to the PowerPoint now. Select the slide and click the Paste button or press CTRL-V on your keyboard. The copied image is now placed on the slide.
The results is that we have an image from the internet or website on our PowerPoint slide. But this pasted image is static here on this slide. Within some 15 minutes, the image on the weather web site will get updated and our PowerPoint will continue to show the old static image.
How to go for a linked image?
That is not what we want! We want a live internet image on our slide for the latest up-to-date information, since we are running a real-time information display.
Go back to the browser and right-click again on the image that we need. Now choose the Save picture as option, as if we are going to save the image to our hard disk.
We are not going to save this picture as this has no use. Copy the name of the image like two_atl_0d0.png in the sample. Click the Cancel button since we don’t need the image to be saved on disc.
Back to the web page. Right-click somewhere on the HTML page, but not on an image. Choose the View source option.
A new document window opens in your browser and it shows the HTML code of your web page, as the web programmer wrote this. We need to perform this ‘difficult’ step in order to find out the full path to our internet image.
Press CTRL+F or look for a Find option at the source document and paste the name of the file name (we copied it earlier). Find the first occurrence of that file name in the HTML source. As you can see on this screenshot, the filename two_atl_0d0.png is located in the folder named xgtwo of the web site domain. Select and copy the value that you see there at the variable src between the 2 single quotes, without the quotes like this:
Next step is to set up the complete URL to this web image. We know that the domain name is http://nhc.noaa.gov. And we have our folder and file name like /xgtwo/two_atl_0d0.png?122033.
When we combine the domain name, with the folder(s) and filename, then our direct url would be like: http://nhc.noaa.gov/xgtwo/two_atl_0d0.png?122033
Use your internet browser again and try out the full URL. Make sure that that image is showing up. You should see the image only on your browser, without all the rest, without all the HTML texts.
Back to PowerPoint. Select Insert at the PowerPoint ribbon and then the Pictures button.
At the file name, paste the full URL that we have tested like http://nhc.noaa.gov/xgtwo/two_atl_0d0.png?122033 and click the down arrow of the Insert button to open it for more options. Choose the option Link to File there.
The internet image is now placed on our slide as before, but now it is linked to the web site.
Each time we open this PowerPoint presentation, it will visit the web site and download the current image for our slides.
The ultimate solution with continuous real-time images
When we would run this presentation as a continuous slide show, then we will be showing old information too. We need a mechanism to update this image during the slide show. This is what our DataPoint tool can do for your information screen, next to many other things it can perform.
Click to open the DataPoint ribbon and then click the presentation Properties button.
Make sure that the option Refresh linked objects automatically is enabled and check the refresh rate. With these settings here, DataPoint will update the linked images every 10 seconds for new updates and update the images on your slides.
Now, we have a real information display where we can display up-to-date images from various web sites for the latest content. If you want, you can add more slides with other information to your presentation.