Make PowerPoint Viewer start a presentation at login

Make PowerPoint Viewer start a presentation at login


For this example we will use PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (PowerPointViewer.exe)

Download:

PowerPoint Viewer is a freely available application used to display PowerPoint presentations. It has limited functionality, but a presentation that has been properly configured to have automated slide transitions and loop the presentation can be displayed indefinitely without input.

Details:

The simplest way to configure PowerPoint Viewer to load a presentation at login is to use the built in command line arguments available for PowerPoint Viewer in conjunction with a batch (.bat) file.

The following steps detail how to make it so that any time a station logs in as a specific user account (for our example, the account "FrontRoom"), a specific PowerPoint presentation (for our example, the presentation "retail.ppt";) is loaded in an automated slideshow.

This can be paired with the AutoLogon function of both L-series and X-series devices to create a "digital sign" that requires no keyboard or mouse interaction to run.

Steps: 

  1. Identify the directory which contains the PowerPoint Viewer executable. The executable is named pptview.exe
  2. Place the presentation to be viewed into the directory that contains the file pptview.exe. For example, pptview.exe is installed to the C:\Documents folder. We place our presentation, named retail.ppt, into the C:\Documents directory.
  3. Within the directory that contains pptview.exe, create a text file that will serve as our playlist. The text file can be named anything you want. Open the text file and enter the full file name surrounded by quotations of the presentation to be loaded. For our example, we will create a text file in the C:\Documents folder and name it playlist.txt. We then open playlist.txt and enter the line "retail.ppt" save, and close.
  4. In that same directory, create another text file, which we will use as our batch file. It can be named anything you want. For our example, it will be named "play.txt"
  5. Open the text file that will become your batch file, and enter information that fits the following syntax@pptview.exe /L [name of the playlist file] where the name of the playlist file should be in quotes. For our example, it looks like this@pptview.exe /L "playlist.txt"
  6. Change the file extension of our batch file from .txt to .bat. When this batch file is run, it will load the chosen PowerPoint presentation in PowerPoint Viewer automatically. In our example, we change the file play.txt to play.bat.
  7. Create a shortcut to the batch file by right-clicking on it and selecting "Create Shortcut"
  8. Navigate to "C:\Documents and Settings\[user account]\Start Menu\Programs\Startup" folder, where [user account] is the name of the account that you intend the presentation to load on. If the Startup folder does not exist, create it. For our example, the user account chosen to run a powerpoint presentation is the account "FrontRoom". The Startup folder does not exist for this user, so we create a folder named Startup inside the "C:\Documents and Settings\FrontRoom\Start Menu\Programs" folder.
  9. Move the shortcut to the batch file into the Startup folder. For our example, we move the shortcut to play.bat into "C:\Documents and Settings\FrontRoom\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"
At this point, any time the user "FrontRoom" is logged on to that specific host, the powerpoint presentation "retail.ppt" will be loaded immediately after boot.



Article ID: 129

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