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How to Use Google Earth Web as a Presentation Tool

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Google Earth isn’t just a cool navigation tool. You can also use it for presentations that involve real-life locations. The app already has a built-in feature just for that purpose.

Let’s say you’re a travel journalist and you want to be able to demonstrate where you’ve been around the world when pitching to new clients. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create such presentations on Google Earth.

1. Get Google Earth and Drive

You can now use Google Earth on any browser , not just Chrome. If you’ve never tried the app before, you can find out more about it by visiting the Google Earth website. From there, hit the Launch Earth button to log in with your Google account.

Also, the app mainly uses Google Drive to store the projects you create, so it’s a good idea to set up an account before making your first presentation.

2. Launch Google Earth and Find the Projects Tool

Once you’ve signed in to Google Earth, our digital planet will appear on your screen with several features on the left sidebar, such as map styles and Google’s tool for measuring area and distance .

Select the Projects icon and, assuming you don’t already have a presentation, click Create and then choose whether you want to store the new project on Google Drive or as a KML file—it stands for Keyhole Markup Language, an XML file that contains geographic information.

As the easiest method, go for the Google Drive option and wait for Google Earth to link up to your account. Once you create a project, click its Pin to Earth icon to make sure you can always find it when logging in.

3. Give Your Project a Title and Description

Take the time to name and describe your new presentation by filling in the two available fields. If nothing else, they can help you remember the purpose or details of each project.

On your dashboard, you have a few more options above your title and description. You can share, reload, or delete the project, as well as copy it, download it as a KML file, or report it for inappropriate content, the last being more useful to visitors.

4. Add Places to Your Google Earth Presentation

Under your project’s title and description is the New feature button, which opens a menu of many more tools. To pin locations of interest, you can either use Search to add place or Add placemark . The latter is especially good if the location you want is too obscure for Google to find.

A location you searched for will already display some details provided by Google, which you can change by clicking Replace . Your own placemarks are blank from the start.

A third option is to zoom in on a location, enter Street View , and click Capture this view . You can then add the place to your project after editing its details. Use this to get Google Earth’s satellite view of your house or a landmark from your travels worth sharing.

All three methods let you edit the locations you choose. This includes:

• Naming and describing them
• Editing the typeface
• Adding images and videos
• Personalizing your placemark’s icon and color
• Choosing the size of your info box
• Previewing the location’s display

When happy, just click the Back arrow—Google automatically saves your project. Every location you add to your presentation joins its list of markers, which you can easily select and edit as necessary.

5. Connect Places With Lines

As a travel journalist, you may want to demonstrate the number of flights you took from your home base in the last year or the stops you made during a long road trip. You can use Google Earth’s lines tool for this.

To do so, select Draw line or shape from the New feature menu. Click the places you want to mark, and lines will automatically appear between them.

Hit Enter to save the shape you made and access its editor. If you close your shape into a square or triangle, for example, you can customize its filling as well as its outline.

Another tool to make your project interesting is the Tilt the view button, which shifts your angle between 2D and 3D. While in a place’s editor, choose the best viewpoint and click Capture this view —that’s what you’ll get when you jump to the location in your presentation.

6. Add Slides to Your Presentation

If you take pictures on your travels, you can add them to your Google Earth presentation to share the people and scenery you encounter and create stories from your travel writing.

In the New feature menu, select Fullscreen slide . Upload your image or video, add whatever text you want, choose a background color, and preview the slide.

Add several of these visuals throughout the presentation to enrich the experience. This is especially useful for more creative projects on Google Earth , like teaching or planning a book.

7. Move Your Presentation’s Features Around

When you have all the places, lines, and slides you need for your project, hold and move each item up or down the list to adjust its order.

The presentation will play from the top to the bottom, so how you lay out all your items affects the impact and flow of your presentation.

If you want to skip an item when presenting, click the Hide feature icon next to it. To bring it back, use the same icon.

Note that you can also create folders through the New feature menu, but they interfere with the presentation, so you’re better off using them to store unused items instead of hiding them individually.

8. Present Your Project

With everything in order, hit the Present button. Unfortunately, Google Earth isn’t PowerPoint, so you can’t automate or speed up transitions, animate text and images, and so on. There are also limits to how often Google Earth is updated .

However, you still end up with a very cool presentation that flies from place to place around the globe, occasionally broken up by slides that could contain photos or even graphs, depending on what you’re presenting as a travel journalist.

Keep in mind that jumping between locations can be dizzying, so choose your presentation’s items carefully, as well as how much detail you add to them and what view you capture for each place.

Take Projects to the Next Level With Google Earth’s Presentation Tool

While there are many better options when it comes to presentation design software, Google Earth is one of the best tools for visualizing geographic themes.

Whether your interest is travel, ecology, history, or culture, keep learning how Google’s advanced map features can deliver the most engaging experience possible.

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Adding Google Earth to PowerPoint – Another Method

I recently received a request for help from one of my readers regarding Google Earth and PowerPoint.  The reader wanted to know how to put a Google Earth tour into PowerPoint.  This website gets lots of hits from folks wanting to learn how to embed Google Earth into their presentations, but Google hasn’t made it easy.  Therefore, I’ve put together a tutorial for one method, but first it might be helpful to clear up a few things.

• Google Earth Tours – Yes, you can create and save tours.  However, the files that are created are KMZ files that can only be opened in Google Earth.  These are NOT video files, and they cannot be easily imported into another program.
• Embedding Google Earth – Right now there is no good way to get Google Earth to play in a PowerPoint slide.  You could create a link on your slide that opens a KMZ file outside of PowerPoint in Google Earth itself.  You could also embed a web page that has the Google Earth plug-in for web enabled, but that get’s to be more complicated than it’s worth.

I’ve already demonstrated how it’s possible to add PowerPoint slides to Google Earth .  However, I still get inquiries for the other way around – adding Google Earth to PowerPoint, even though the two points above make it difficult, if not impossible.   Well, there are a couple of ways, but they’re not perfect.  The first involves just exporting static images from Google Earth and putting those images into your slides.  The other involves video screen capture.  Here’s how it’s done… First, you need some sort of screen capture program that will save your work as a standard video file.  Jing is great, but the free version only saves as a Flash SWF file, which won’t work with PowerPoint.  I recommend the free CamStudio , which is a simple, lightweight screen capture program.

Using screen capture you don’t even need to create a Google Earth tour.  You simply start the capture program recording, then visit the sites you want in Google Earth.  Once you’re done, save the screen capture as an AVI file, which can be imported into PowerPoint.  Here is a video demonstration…(Note – the tutorial starts as soon as you click the link)

If you would like to see a larger version of the tutorial you can do so here at this link .

The video on the tutorial is a bit jerky because I was running both Adobe Captivate and Camstudio. Trust me, though. The final product is very smooth and works very well. If you would like to see the actual video that I recorded in this session it’s available on YouTube here…

One of the other benefits of this method is that it will work without an Internet connection. Everything is self-contained to your PowerPoint presentation.

Of course, you could eliminate the screen capture step by subscribing to Google Earth Professional. It has a way of exporting AVI files directly from the program. However, it’s pricey – nearly $500 per year for subscription. This method will probably work just as well unless you want broadcast quality.

Related Posts:

• Adding Google Earth to PowerPoint
• Google Earth Plus PowerPoint Mash-up

3 thoughts on “ Adding Google Earth to PowerPoint – Another Method ”

Someone is copying your articles: http://powerpointfan.blogspot.com/2010/04/add-google-earth-to-powerpoint.html

Interesting…looks like they copied all of my PowerPoint articles wholesale. Even the internal reference links have been copied. Unfortunately, commenting is disabled on that site. If they are going to steal my content so unabashedly, I doubt they would respond to a comment or an e-mail.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention, though.

Thanks a lot for the tutorial! It helped a lot 🙂

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The least boring type of slideshow —

Google earth gets content creation tools for geography-focused presentations, build a presentation with text, images, videos, and terabytes of google earth imagery..

Ron Amadeo - Nov 20, 2019 5:21 pm UTC

Google Earth is getting a new content creation feature set . You'll now be able to make presentations using Google's vast 3D Earth imagery and point-of-interest information. It's sort of like a geography-focused Powerpoint.

Further Reading

And like a normal presentation, you can create slides and attach text, images, and videos. Since this is Google Earth, though, all the text and images get overlaid on top of Google's terabytes of Earth imagery. You can pick from Google Earth's 3D views or Street View, set the camera just right, and capture a view. As you click through slides in your presentation, Google Earth will smoothly fly from point to point as your slides pop up.

Just like with any other Google Drive product, you can collaborate with others in real time. The Google Earth apps for Android and iOS support viewing these presentations, too.

reader comments

Channel ars technica.

Google Earth

Earth has a new look, create with streamlined actions.

The new menu bar & keyboard shortcuts make your favorite geospatial tools easier to use than ever

Collaborate with your team

Projects saved to Google Drive can be shared and edited like Docs and Sheets, making collaboration a breeze

Visualize your data

Add placemarks to highlight key locations in your project, draw lines and shapes directly on the globe, and import KML files

Work across your devices

Use your phone to add places, images, and videos to your maps. Then, pick it up from your browser later.

Tell your story

Showcase an interactive slideshow of your project

• Google Earth on web Examine the world without leaving your desk. Available on Chrome and other browsers.
• Google Earth on mobile Create maps with advanced geospatial features on PC, Mac, or Linux
• Google Earth Pro on desktop Create maps with advanced tools on PC, Mac, or Linux.

How to Use Google Earth to Enhance Your Presentations

I’m a frequent user of Google Earth to help enrich my presentations in front of large and demanding audiences. When introducing a new and exotic location, I find nothing beats an attractive and useful map or satellite image.

How many times have you watched a travel video wishing they’d included a map to provide some idea of location? — especially in these days of exploding numbers of YouTube travel vloggers!

How Can You Provide Geographic Context in Presentations?

Television news studios have been doing this for ages, and now you have the tools to do it yourself. What do I mean?

How many times have you seen a news story where the camera appears to zoom towards a particular location on earth as an intro shot? In the old days, this would have been nearly impossible for an individual at home with their own computer.

Here’s a quick example of the type of geographic context I like to provide in my own travel videos .

Google earth provides excellent tutorial videos .

Introducing satellite fly-overs in your presentations can be daunting at first.  Once you begin to experiment with the tools available, I think you’ll begin to see that it is time well spent.  I would say that you could produce your first Google Earth fly over in a couple of hours.

It took me days of experimenting when I first began to use Google Earth Pro, but I didn’t have the benefit of the excellent video tutorials that Google provides today.  

Google Earth Tutorial: Intro to Creation Tools

Here’s a short tutorial intro to an excellent series of videos on a simple approach to incorporating satellite images into your own presentations:

In my work, I frequently use Google Earth Pro to produce video flyovers.  I really enjoy the fact that I can zoom into any location on earth and, if the resolution of the image is good enough, I can take my audience on a quick tour by following a particular geographic feature such as a shoreline or river, circling a mountain peak, or hopping from one island to the next. Pro is a free stand alone program that you can download onto your system.

Here’s one of my own short videos as an example. I’ve used Google Earth Pro to provide visual context to each location in the area surrounding Cape Town, South Africa. This is one of our favorite cities in the entire world with its stunning scenery and lovely climate.

If you don’t want to set up Google Earth Pro on your computer, you have an easy solution:  Google Earth Studio.

Google Earth Studio is Quick and Easy

Google has added a user-friendly way of producing animated fly-overs using google earth studio, which works directly in the chrome browser. .

Here’s a quick video introduction, the first of a series on using Google Earth Studio. 

Tips on Using Google Earth Studio

Tip #1 – my number one tip for google earth studio:.

In order to use them, you have to take all those hundreds of images and import them into your video editing program.

Once in my editing program (I use PowerDirector), I find that the duration for each jpeg has to be extremely short if you want to have a properly paced video that doesn’t drag along at slow speed. 

My second tip – watch some good tutorial videos before going whole hog on your own production!

You can literally save yourself hours and hours of experimenting by learning from the pros. 

Cinematic Affects using Google Earth Studio 

Here’s a great intro from TMS Productions on using Google Earth Studio in films and presentations. In this case TMS imports the images into Adobe After Effects, but you could do the same using any video editing software (I use Cyberlink Power Director – powerful yet user friendly).

Google Earth View Provides Thousands of Stunning Images

For a quick intro check out this video:

Many of these images have an other worldly quality to them – with amazing colors, textures, and shapes that verge on the abstract. For adding visual interest to your presentations they are hard to beat!

Google Earth View provides an excellent source for stunning images, with over 2,000 images to choose from.  Not only do these satellite images make great wallpaper for your computer screen, they can make great full frame slides to use in your presentations! 

As you can see there are thousands of locations available throughout the the world, and half the fun is clicking on these dots to see what comes up. Don’t be surprised if you get totally distracted!

Best of luck with producing your own images and videos using these exciting tools to provide geographic context and stunning visuals in your own presentations.

Présentation

• Bonnes pratiques
• Attribution
• Conditions requises
• Mises à jour de Earth Studio
• Notions de base
• Gestion de projets
• Projets à démarrage rapide
• Créer des animations
• Animation à l'aide d'images clés
• Lissage de vitesse
• Cloud rendering
• Fonctionnalités avancées
• Créer une animation depuis l'espace
• Mode Multi-View
• Cible de la caméra
• Attributs spéciaux
• Superpositions et fichiers KML
• Exportation de données de caméra 3D

Google Earth Studio est un outil en ligne permettant de créer des animations à l'aide des images satellite et 3D de Google Earth.

Google Earth dispose d'un stock très important de données 2D et 3D sur la planète Terre. Celles-ci couvrent aussi bien des caractéristiques géologiques à grande échelle que des bâtiments individuels. Earth Studio est la solution la plus simple pour exploiter ces images sous forme fixe ou animée.

Pour concevoir Earth Studio, nous nous sommes inspirés des outils d'animation standards de l'industrie afin que les professionnels s'y retrouvent facilement et puissent commencer à créer des animations immédiatement. Par ailleurs, la solution contient un certain nombre d'outils utiles, tels que les projets à démarrage rapide , qui permettent à tous les utilisateurs de créer de superbes projets très rapidement.

Dans cette documentation, vous trouverez une présentation complète et détaillée des fonctionnalités d'Earth Studio. Vous découvrirez également comment obtenir rapidement les meilleurs résultats possible à l'aide de l'outil. Vous pouvez la lire en entier comme un guide ou l'utiliser ponctuellement comme référence.

Nous vous invitons également à consulter nos tutoriels vidéo .

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Google Earth

Create stories and maps.

With creation tools, you can draw on the map, add your photos and videos, customize your view, and share and collaborate with others.

Create on Earth

Draw on the map.

Add placemarks to highlight key locations in your project, or draw lines and shapes directly on the map.

Add your photos and videos

Feature images and videos on your map to add rich contextual information.

Customize your view

Make use of Google Earth's detailed globe by tilting the map to save a perfect 3D view or diving into Street View for a 360 experience.

Share your story with the world

Collaborate with others like a Google Doc and share your story as a presentation.