Introduction

The LaserGraphics slide maker attached to the Macintosh Quadra 700 (Mariana) was purchased for the used of McConnell Brain Imaging Centre personnel. In an effort to ease its use, I have created this document, which describes how to go about creating slides using Showcase on an SGI, or PowerPoint on a Mac or PC.

There are three steps to the slide (or print) creation process:

1. Create the slides to be shot with either Showcase or PowerPoint. The choice is not critical, it is simply what you are used to. However, Showcase is a more general purpose program, whereas PowerPoint has slide creation as its only purpose in life. PowerPoint is generally easier to use, and can produce many of the same effects as Showcase. In addition, PowerPoint is available for the PC and Mac platforms, whereas Showcase requires you to sit at an SGI. Unfortunately, there is only one general purpose copy of PowerPoint around, and that runs on Mariana.
2. If you created your slides somewhere other than Mariana, transfer them to Mariana. There is a program on Mariana called Fetch that can do this over the network.
3. Run POM (Professional Output Manager). POM takes your slides, and sends them to the slide maker.