Monday, January 12, 2009

Opening PowerPoint Slideshows

Scenario: Users want to store files in SharePoint and open them from another website. The users are on a network with Internet Explorer (IE) 6 or 7 and Office 2007. This should not be an issue.

However, files of type .pps (PowerPoint slideshows) were opening in a undesirable manner.

Instead of opening in full-screen slideshow mode, the PPS files were opening in Edit mode inside of PowerPoint.

After doing a bit of research and testing, I believe this is the only solution that will allow PPS files to open in slideshow mode when using Internet Explorer and Office 2007. This site talks about it too. In a nutshell, it requires a client side configuration. Nothing on the server side can do the trick if the user is on Internet Explorer and Office 2007. It's not even an issue with SharePoint. It happens on non-SharePoint sites too.

This solution references this Microsoft KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299824/

Basically, each computer needs to have its registry changed:

  1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
  2. Locate and click the following key in the registry:
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PowerPoint.Show.8
  3. Edit or add the following registry value:
    Value name: BrowserFlags
    Data type: REG_DWORD
    Radix: click Hexadecimal
    Value data: (see below)

It appears that Office 2007 changes the default value to "a", which means PPS files open in Edit mode. You can change the value to 8 (open in a new window in show mode) or 0 (open in the browser window in show mode), but this is a local computer change that would need to be done on each PC. Not realistic. :-(

Accessing the files in Firefox works fine: PPS files open as slide shows, no problem.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

what about Powerpoint 2003? I have the same problem - a .pps in sharepoint opening in edit mode - but that flag change does not solve it.

Thanks

Joelsef said...

I'm not sure about PowerPoint 2003. I vaguely remember there being another fix you can do for that, but I can't remember it off the top of my head.

ALIA BLOG said...

I am very new in Sharepoint . In my intranet site, Users who try to edit a PowerPoint document whilst another user has it open in edit mode do not get any messages to notify them that the file is already opened in edit mode.

The file opens as default read only although the users may still assume it’s been opened in Edit Mode. I want to generate a message that appears when two users need to edit a word document.

Where should be starting pointing in this small project. Any help will be appreciated.

cimplebs said...

Thanks Joelsef. I have spent 4 hours trying to figure this out. Is there not some way through the html link to force the users browser config to change this temporarily. I know this is an old issue for you, but it's still very real in Oct 2011 and I doubt that go-daddy will let me change the server side. thanks.

Anonymous said...

In case it helps anyone, for PowerPoint 2010, the reg key is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PowerPoint.Show.12.