I was prepping for a meeting recently and wanted to use some basic animations in a PowerPoint slide deck. Nothing fancy–just bringing bullet list items one at a time as a discussion unfolds. And was resigned to schlep my laptop great distances (10m from my desk to the meeting room). Until I remembered I could as the innerwebs.
Me: Hey innerwebs, can I use my PowerPoint with animations on my iPad?
Innerwebs: To a significant extent, yes. Try Slideshark.
Slideshark isn’t super-sophisticated. It’s also free for a basic membership. From first glance the paid versions (individual or “team”) come with more than the default 100MB storage. 100MB will be plenty for me.
You can either email (Open with…) or their web-based file upload tool to get your file onto your iPad. Once you’re in Slideshark the command are pretty straightforward:
- Tap a presentation to open it
- Sweep left or tap to advance slide–or the next animation on a slide with animations
- Sweep right to go back a slide or animation
- Sweep up to reveal all slides
- Press and hold screen to activate the “laser pointer”
I tested it with a slide show that uses basic (fly in) animations on one slide. Worked no problem. The support info says “some sophisticated animations” might not work. I’m thinking scripted ones. For most users this should be fine.
One note of caution: Slideshark actually converts your PowerPoint deck to its own proprietary format: there’s no downloading and editing. Instead you need to go back to your original .ppt/,pptx file, make any edits, then load that updated presentation to Slideshark.
I’m generally suspicous of iOS apps that require signing up for “free” account. I’ll let you know if I think these folks have sent me to spam purgatory.
