Hello Digi,
For the native (full fidelity) PowerPoint slide show format (*.ppt, *.pps)
the recipients will always need to install some kind of application that
knows how to open/view the slide show file. If you customers don't have
PowerPoint or the PowerPoint Viewer (and you don't include it) there is no
way for them to open/view a *.ppt, or *.pps presentation file. The good
news is that the PowerPoint Viewer is freely available for download. Which
viewer you recommend will depend on which version of PowerPoint you are
using tor creating your presentations.
PowerPoint 97 or 2000 - Recommend downloading and installing PowerPoint
Viewer 97
PowerPoint 2002 or 2003 - Recommend downloading and installing PowerPoint
Viewer 2003
One thing to be aware of is that if your presentation contains linked
content, then the recipients will only receive the PowerPoint file and not
the linked content. Do you know if your *.WAV file is embedded or linked?
If it's embedded, then this is not a problem. However, if it's linked, then
you need to find some way of sending both the presentation and the sound
file as a single e-mail attachment that, when opened by the recipient, does
not require any additional effort, on their part, to view (and hear) the
presentation intended. For this scenario (and if you are using PowerPoint
2002 or PowerPoint 2003), you might want to consider an alternative to
sending the presentation in it's native format.
Everybody (?) has a web browser on their computer, so a workaround is to
distribute your presentations as single file web pages (MHTML
. This is a
feature of both PowerPoint 2002 and PowerPoint 2003. Now you have a single
file that when you double-click on it will display an HTML version of the
PowerPoint slide show in the default browser for that system. Of course
there are limitations and differences between PowerPoint HTML presentation
slide shows and native *.ppt/*.pps presentation slide shows viewed using
PowerPoint or the PowerPoint Viewer. Only you can decide, for your
presentations, whether these differences offset the convenience of the
single-file MHTML distributable slide show.
If you (or anyone else reading this message) think that PowerPoint provide
a way of distributing a presentation (with all it's supporting content) as
a single file which can be viewed in it's full fidelity without permanently
installing/copying any software on the destination computer, don't forget
to send your feedback to Microsoft at:
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp
As with all product suggestions, it's important that you not just state
your wish but also WHY it is important to you that your product suggestion
be implemented by Microsoft. Microsoft receives thousands of product
suggestions every day and we read each one but, in any given product
development cycle, there are only sufficient resources to address the ones
that are most important to our customers so take the extra time to state
your case as clearly and completely as possible.
IMPORTANT: Each submission should be a single suggestion (not a list of
suggestions)
John Langhans
Microsoft Corporation
Supportability Program Manager
Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows
Microsoft Office Picture Manager for Windows
For FAQ's, highlights and top issues, visit the Microsoft PowerPoint
support center at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=ppt
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbhowto
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Use of any included script samples are subject to the terms specified at
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm