Monday, September 3, 2012

How to Create a PowerPoint Slide Show to Run Without PowerPoint

You've spent hours creating a top class PowerPoint slide show which you're going to send to some friends or colleagues or you might want to make the presentation available in a folder on a shared drive and you're just not quite sure who has and who hasn't got PowerPoint installed on their PC. And even if you do know you may not know if it's PowerPoint 20003 or PowerPoint 2007.
One way to be ABSOLUTELY SURE the PowerPoint presentation will run on any PC is to use the excellent "Package for CD" feature in PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007. You could also use this facility to create archive folders of your PowerPoint presentations.
This feature will help you create a folder containing the relevant files which you can then burn to a CD and then send to your users. The CD will then auto-run your presentation. Alternatively you can make the folder itself available to your users directly. When you use "Package for CD" PowerPoint creates the normal PowerPoint slide show file along with a PowerPoint viewer and essential supporting files.
In this article we'll describe how to create the folder and then you can burn this to a CD yourself if you have the necessary CD burning software. You could burn the folder directly to CD by using "Burn to CD" option. Your users can then use the viewer to show the presentation irrespective of whether they have PowerPoint installed or not.
To use this feature we'll firstly create our slide show and then save it with an appropriate name. Suppose you've called it Demo1 for example. With the PowerPoint file still open, in PowerPoint 2003 choose File, Package for CD. In PowerPoint 2007 choose the Office Button, Publish, then select Package for CD.