I have been set a challenge:
Find a way to synchronise PowerPoint on several machines running the same presentation.
The reason for this is that we want to run some presentations over a 10Mbps WAN. The audio is not a problem for getting the presenters voice to all sites, however using something like VNC, Office Communcator and the like to show a PowerPoint presentation at those sites is not very slick. Everything is fine at the primary site running the actual PowerPoint application, but remote viewers complain of laggy screen updates and jerkiness, especially when slides contain either video or animated content.
My idea is to run the same presentation at each site locally, so all that needs to be done then is keep the presentation in synch with one and other.
In playing with PowerShell, I have worked out how to open a pptx file:
$pptx = "{path to file}"
$application = New-Object -ComObject powerpoint.application
$presentation = $application.Presentations.open($pptx)
$application.visible = "msoTrue"
$presentation.SlideShowSettings.Run()
So I can get a PowerPoint show started up and click through the show to the end. However I have not been able to find a way for PowerShell to trigger a "next slide" step.
Is it possible in any way?