Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer

~ the obituary ~

University in Turkey between 2003 and 2010 meant carrying a presentation to a machine that was not yours. The lab PC, or the desktop wired to the projector in the seminar room. Half of those machines had a full Office install and half had whatever the last person left behind, and the small free reader you could copy onto a floppy or a flash drive was the difference between presenting and standing there apologizing. PowerPoint Viewer was that reader for twenty one years.

The oldest one that survives in the record is PowerPoint Viewer 97, version 8.0, a companion to the release that also gave the world Clippy and VBA macros. It read files written by PowerPoint 97 and nothing newer, and it had no idea what to do with VBA macros or animated GIFs, which by the standards of 1997 meant it was missing most of what made people put things in a deck in the first place.

PowerPoint Viewer 2003 was the one everybody actually had. The executable was pptview.exe, it understood the animation engine introduced in PowerPoint 2002, and Microsoft patched it for years. The 2007 viewer that followed was the 2003 viewer with the Office conversion pack folded in, so it could turn a .pptx back into something the older engine could draw. The 2010 viewer was the last, and the first that could open a password-protected presentation without complaining.

~ the case file ~

~ package for cd ~

PowerPoint 2003 shipped a feature called Package for CD, and it is the reason the viewer outlived its usefulness by about a decade. You pointed it at a presentation and it wrote the file, every linked video and font it depended on, an autorun.inf and a copy of pptview.exe into one folder or straight onto a blank disc. Drop that CD into any Windows machine and the slideshow started on its own.

Conference organizers used it. Trade stands used it for the loop running on a screen all day, since the viewer would honor kiosk mode if the author had set it in the show options. It was also how a lot of coursework got handed in, because a CD that plays itself does not care whether the grader has Office.

~ what it would not do ~

The license and the feature list both drew hard edges. You could view and you could print, and editing was not on offer at any version. The 2003 viewer removed Run Program hyperlinks entirely for security reasons, so decks built to launch an external application from a slide simply did nothing. It exposed no object model, which meant no other program could automate it. It also dropped the kiosk password dialog, so the unattended slideshow on the trade stand could always be stopped by anyone who walked up to it.

Those absences are the shape of a product Microsoft built to protect a format rather than to make anyone productive. The viewer existed so that .ppt could be sent to people who had not bought PowerPoint, and every capability past reading it was a reason somebody might not buy PowerPoint.

~ the retirement notice ~

On 16 November 2017 a post went up on the Office sustained engineering blog listing four downloads due to be retired in April 2018: the Excel Viewer, the PowerPoint Viewer, the PowerPoint 2007 Viewer and the Office Compatibility Pack. The Word Viewer had already gone that same month. The precise date turned out to be 30 April 2018, and Microsoft's own support page still states it in one flat line.

What replaced it needs an account. PowerPoint for the web is free, but it wants a Microsoft account and it wants the file uploaded to OneDrive or Dropbox first. The mobile apps are free and want a store login. The thing PowerPoint Viewer did, which was open a file already sitting on a disk on a machine with no connection and no user profile that belonged to you, is not something any of the replacements do.

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