If you’ve tried to save a presentation to a CD from PowerPoint 2010, you might be misled by the onscreen instructions into believing that the PowerPoint Viewer application will be added to your CD.
This is anything but the case. The PowerPoint Viewer is not added to your CD so you won’t have it with you and if you take your PowerPoint presentation to a computer that doesn’t have the viewer on it and you don’t have an internet connection, you’re SOL. Poor show Microsoft!
What the presentation CD will contain is a HTML file that will launch when you place the CD in a computer. This contains a link to download the PowerPoint Viewer from the web. You have to go to the web site and then download and install it on the target machine – the Viewer cannot be run from the CD.
While most people won’t have a huge problem with this, it would be nice if Microsoft actually told the truth about the process and warned you what you need to have and to do. Otherwise many hapless folk are going to assume that it all works as it has in the past and arrive at presentation time without PowerPoint on the computer they are presenting on and having to download and install the viewer before they can begin. The situation will be worse still if an internet connection isn’t available.
So, as always, make sure to test your presentation thoroughly before you start. Know that you may need extra time to download the viewer or go ahead and download it ahead of time and take a copy with you that you can install on the computer you will be presenting on.