The title says it all. This really shouldn’t be hard, but I searched a number of forums full of gripes from people with no answers, and even on a microsoft forum, a microsoft reply said basically “sorry you can’t do that”. I felt this was particularly poor misinformation given that as below, I persevered with looking further and found a perfectly good solution that does it easily.
This post here was a start – you can do a “file/save as” of a a presentation, and select “powerpoint show” i.e. PPSX file (there is also a macro-enabled show file but did not need to try that). This looked promising as it did start the show when clicked on as a local file, but still did not actually start the show when shared via a hyperlink.
Later I found this post here which gave a clue to the issue and tried just adding a query string parameter “action=embedview” to the link URL. This worked perfectly in exactly the way I wanted – the show started automatically via the embedded viewer but still showed in a browser tab. If you want full screen you can use f11 as normal to toggle it in the browser. I didn’t care for having a link which directly took you into full screen powerpoint showing, as this takes control away from those who might be unaware of what is going on. There is an ‘open in new window’ icon at the bottom right, and this does open the presentation in a new tab without showing it, but this is fine, if someone wants to play with it they can. It also means they can save a copy themselves, but I was happy with this as they are viewing it all anyway, and if it was a web page they could export to PDF so not much different.
One key point on this is that it only worked when the file was hosted on my company MS onedrive share which actually had the office licence. It did not work on a Zen hosted file (it just downloaded it), and when I tried on a free MS onedrive share, it opened the presentation without running it directly, even when the above query string parameter was added. I am not sure of the reason for this, and may look into this further at some point, but it was not an issue anyway – I just needed to host the file on the correct share, and create a read only onedrive hyperlink with onedrive, and then add the query string parameter to the url, and it all worked fine.
This meant I could easily prepare simple powerpoint presentations to share for viewing, more easily than trying to put web pages together to do a similar thing – after all, the kind of presentation I wanted is exactly what powerpoint is for, and it does it easily. It was just a shame that the solution does not appear to be documented well online, but I was thankful for a good solution in the end.
