Barcoding allows immediate downloading of PowerPoint presentations by smart phones

T he PowerPoint presentation is the primary medium for medical education. Everyone involved in medical education has experienced the sinking feeling of watching a presentation and thinking ‘This is important information! I really could use a copy.’ We describe a novel mobile device strategy which allows the dissemination of PowerPoint presentations at the time of delivery. PowerPoint presentations have previously been, and sometimes still are, printed and supplied as handouts. More recently they are being made available on flash drives. Both these approaches are somewhat wasteful, as many handouts and flash drives are not taken or taken and latter misplaced. Another approach is uploading the presentation to a specialized website after it has been given, but this is time-consuming and after the presentation the ‘teachable moment’ may be lost. Embedded barcodes can make PowerPoint presentations immediately available for download, annotation, storage, recall and editing into one’s own presentations. To our knowledge this is the first time this technique has been described it only requires a few steps after the presentation has been prepared. A barcode linking to a PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the technique is shown in Fig. 1. Briefly, the PowerPoint presentation is uploaded to an online file-sharing site (e.g., www.4shared.com). As part of this process, the file-sharing site creates a web address for the file. The web address is then copied and pasted into an online mobile device barcode generator (e.g., tec-it, http:// barcode.tec-it.com/barcode-generator.aspx?LANG en). A barcode is created that links the user to the file’s web address. The barcode is then copied and pasted into the PowerPoint presentation. Attendees can scan the barcode from the projection screen using an application (app) on their smart phone. We recommend the Google Goggles mobile scanning application that can be installed without charge on both android phones and iPhones (www. google.com/mobile/goggles/#text). Once the barcode has been scanned, the app reads the barcode and displays the web address. The web address can be followed to the file and the presentation downloaded. We have used this technique in recent presentations and found it well received. It could also be used to embed barcode links to other files or media, such as YouTube videos, into PowerPoint presentations.