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Wireless Control of PowerPoint from Zaurus?

Posted by Cliff on from the slide-shows-and-wireless-powerpointers dept.

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."

3 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Better options than PowerPoint by riggwelter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I head up the Word Projecttion team at Soul Survivor, and we use Presenter from Discovery Systems in Australia to display the song words. (I'm assuming this is for song display in worship). It's a much better tool than PowerPoint for this job for a few reasons:
    • It's cheaper ;-)
    • It's designed with this purpose in mind - you have 'random' access within songs, and quick access to other songs should your Worship Leader deviate from his/her songlist.
    • It allows different displays for control, front of house and foldback

      • As for the remote control on your Zaurus, go for VNC, you can get it from Zaurus Zone and, of course, it's free.
    --
    Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
  2. Keep It Simple by ishmalius · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I would suggest that you keep it as simple as possible. I have done things like this before, and it is not hard.

    Try, either by some VB for Applications script within Powerpoint, or an ActiveX component dragged onto it, to periodically poll a web application, asking "what do I do next" . The web app can return strings like "slide 1" "slide 2" or "go back" ... stuff like that.

    The same app would have a page associated with it, with form controls used to set the current command.

    Example:

    1. Browser displays the control page generated by the webapp, including the button "next slide".

    2. User hits the button, sending the form back to the web app. The "next slide" command is stored.

    3. The VB script, or ActiveX component fetches the "next slide" command.

    4. The script tells PowerPoint to turn the page.

    This should fit in to your desire to do the thing in Java, since the web app could easily be a servlet. In addition, the server could be on the same machine that is displaying the slides.

    One benefit of this is that creating your own GUI would be unnecessary. Even better, no code is necessary for the Zaurus! Just use the Opera browser, and you're done!.

    Hope this helps.

  3. Re:ActiveX by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Simple. A PowerPoint COM interface runs on the PowerPoint server and communicates with the Zaurus with HTTP or your choice of other fine open protocols.

    I could hack up one in VB in ten minutes.