Displaying PowerPoint slides on a web page automatically

Question

Anyone know of any Flash components that would do the job of displaying an external PowerPoint file (e.g. .PPT, .PPTX) file in a Flash movie on a web page? Or a way of automatically parsing uploaded PowerPoint docs from a PHP-based CMS and displaying them on a web page.

Our client needs to be able to upload a PowerPoint documents on their site without any intervention (if necessary).

I know about Slideshare and the like, but the content needs to live on the client's web server due to security restrictions. Also, Adobe Presenter seems to require Adobe software/plugins on the clients machine which wouldn't be ideal.

Answer 1

You could use Google Docs. It supports previewing PDF/PPT/DOC (Don't know about XLS) files.

I use it on one of my projects and it behaves very well.

You can call it using http://docs.google.com/gview?url=<your absolute file url here>

you could also use the embed=true parameter to embed it into your site, using an iframe or that sort of thing.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Using COM you can save a PPT as a PDF (see this question), and then use swftools' great (and free) pdf2swf utility to get nice swfs.

Answer 3

You can use http://ajaxdocumentviewer.com/. I use it on a large site with good success. It will require a flash or pdf viewer plugin.

Answer 4

Hmm have you looked at the new Sharepoint 2010? They do have some sort of integration with MS Office 2010. The demo i saw allows collaboration as well as uploading and viewing powerpoint slides (with all the nice transitions preserved) and even some minor edit functions.

For the browser I think they said that there isn't a need a install any plugins like flash or silverlight and works on all browsers.