How do I make a nice Powerpoint for the Live Auction

Well, there's no automated way to do a mail-merge like the catalog, sorry.

The best way is come up with a nice template slide for each live item, then make them manually by copying each slide and pasting in the item description..etc.

New!

We have some dinners which we would like to sell most of the seats in the silent auction, but then hold back a pair of seats for the live auction.

To do this, just make mention of that fact in the description - then train your bid sheet collectors who usually circle the winning bids for data entry to circle 2 fewer seats.. thus holding back a pair to sell in the live auction.

Collect (close the bidding on) these dinners with enough time to enter sales for them before the live auction starts (or at least before the first such item comes up for bid).

Now, install a plug-in for PowerPoint called "LiveWeb". This will enable you to 'embed' a web page in your slide. For each of the live items, embed a link to the following URL, substituting your appropriate system name in place of firstuu, and the item number in place of D123 below:

http://togetherauction.com/firstuu/winners/item/D123

Until some sales are entered for the item (or if there is no item D123), this will render as a blank page, so you will have a white box on your slide... but then as soon as some winners are entered, they will appear like this:

Qty Winner
1 Joe & Jane Winner

This will allow you to sell the last pair of seats for the dinner without worrying that some bidders who already won might bid again, or that folks will fail to bid because they think they might have won - this will make it clear to all, without revealing how much they bid.

You should enter a test sale for some item and experiment to get the box size correct, then change the URL on each slide to match that item number.

In future, I may do a similar feature to allow a slide to show on the thank you page at the end of the live auction the grand total sales $.