Wireless Control of PowerPoint from Zaurus?

dancedance asks: "I am a high school student who is very involved in the AV at my local church. We use PowerPoint on a weekly basis in our service, and also in our high school program. I would like to be able to control PowerPoint- similar to the way that Slide Show Commander works- from my Zaurus PDA using a WiFi connection. I am working on an open source Java application to do this, but I am struggling on how to get the full text/ view of the slides out of PowerPoint. Any Suggestions on this, or any aspect of my project would be useful."

Comments

Re:ActiveX

[good-n-nappy]

I think the point was to write an application in Windows to interface with PowerPoint then write some kind of protocol to communicate between the Zaurus and the Windows app.

You could get something very simple working very quickly - for example getting the text out of the slides. Here is a link that will get you started creating a COM Addin for PowerPoint (using Visual Studio). I would recommend creating the Windows side of your app using Visual Basic. Yes, Visual Basic isn't sexy but you can have a working PowerPoint add-in in about 10 minutes. To communicate with the Zaurus, you'll probably want to use a MS Winsock control. Again, this is a standard MS thing so you can just plug it in.

Once you have the MS side working as your PowerPoint server, you just create a client on your Zaurus to talk to the server. Java would probably work nicely for that. (Theoretically, you could also create the add-in to PowerPoint using Java but you'll waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to use COM in Java. And since you're using a MS product anyway, why not go whole hog, eh?)

Try VNC first and if you don't have enough bandwidth for some reason, go with this route.