A standalone, offline PowerPoint deck viewer for Windows. Point it at a folder, it finds every presentation inside, and it opens and presents them with pixel-perfect fidelity - no Office licence required, no network access, no sign-in.

Point it at a git repository and it also finds the decks inside that repository's sub-repositories, so a monorepo of course material reads as one library instead of twenty folders.

Built for one person on one machine. Nothing leaves your PC.

MIT licensed - see LICENSE.

Fixed in 2.0: version 1 forced every export to 1920×1080 regardless of the deck's real shape, so any 4:3 deck (Module 4_AWS Database Services_PART 1_2, AWS Networking & Content Delivery, and others in your library) was displayed stretched and squashed. Renders are now sized from each deck's own page setup. Because that changes the pixels, the cache key changed too: previously cached decks re-render themselves the next time you open them, and Prune clears the old entries away.

No. It works. This was tested on your machine before a line of the app was written.

An expired Office subscription puts PowerPoint into reduced functionality mode - you can open and view files but not edit them. That sounds like it would break automation, and in some Office products it does. It does not for PowerPoint's read/export paths, which is all this app uses. Verified working:

Because the viewer only ever reads, reduced functionality mode is not a problem. It never tries to save or modify your decks.

One edge case worth knowing: if you ever fully sign out of Office or let the licence lapse into a state where automation is disabled, the app detects it and tells you plainly instead of failing silently. See Troubleshooting.

• Windows 10/11, x64
• Microsoft PowerPoint installed (any recent version)

PowerPoint is used as the rendering engine. That is the whole point: it is the only thing on the machine that knows how to lay out a slide exactly as PowerPoint would, including custom fonts, SmartArt, and complex masters. There is no Office licence check, no login, and no network call - but PowerPoint itself must be present.

If PowerPoint is missing, the app starts, the engine pill in the top-right turns red and reads no engine, and it will tell you so.

Installed (recommended)

Run dist\PPT Viewer Setup 2.0.0.exe once. It installs per-user - no admin prompt - and adds a PPT Viewer entry to your Start Menu. Press Win and type "PPT" to launch it. It also registers a normal uninstaller in Settings > Apps > Installed apps.

Portable (no install)

dist\PPT Viewer 2.0.0.exe is a single self-contained file. Copy it anywhere and double-click it. It re-extracts to a temp folder on each launch, so it starts a little slower than the installed version.

From source

npm install
npm start

Rebuilding

npm run dist

Output lands in dist\.

1. Click Add folder and pick a directory. Everything is scanned recursively - subfolders included - for .ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx, .pptm, .ppsm, .potx and .potm.
2. Click any deck to open it.
3. Present (or F5) starts the fullscreen slideshow.

You can also drag a folder onto the window to add it, or drag a single deck to open it immediately. Right-click a deck in the list to reveal it in Explorer.

If a folder you add is a git repository, the sidebar's Repositories section lists it with its branch and a deck count. Any repository nested inside it - a git submodule, a vendored checkout, a git worktree - is listed underneath with its own branch. Clicking one narrows the deck list to it; the breadcrumb above the list shows where you are and takes you back.

Decks below a nested repository belong to that repository, not the one containing it, which is almost always what you want when a monorepo has per-team slide decks.

Folders that are not repositories still work exactly as before - they simply do not appear in that section.

Video, audio and animated GIFs embedded in a deck play in both the viewer and the slideshow.

• A video starts when you arrive at its slide, stops at the point its author set, and restarts from the top if you come back to the slide.
• Click any playing media to pause it, click again to resume.
• The toolbar shows what the current slide contains (1 video, 2 audio, and so on) and the speaker button mutes it.
• Media plays with sound, as it would in PowerPoint's own slideshow.

PowerPoint flattens a video into its poster frame when exporting a slide, so the video is drawn back over that exact frame using the shape's own position and size read from the file. It lines up precisely, including cropped and rotated shapes.

Formats Chromium can decode are played natively - that covers .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .webm, .mp3, .m4a, .wav, .ogg, .flac and .gif. Legacy .avi and .wmv cannot be decoded and will simply stay as their poster frame.

N toggles the notes sidebar. Closing it leaves a slim Notes tab on the right edge, so the wider stage is never a one-way door.

Presenter (or S) opens a second window to put on the projector while the audience window stays on your laptop. It shows the slide on screen, the next slide, the speaker notes, an elapsed timer and the wall clock.

Advancing works from either window - they are kept in step, so you can click in the presenter window and the audience window follows. R resets the timer, Esc closes the presenter window.

If you have two monitors, the presenter window opens on the one the audience window is not using.

Slides are rendered once to PNG and kept on disk, because re-rendering is far slower than reading a file. Measured on this machine:

The difference between the last two reopen figures is the point of the cache: a fully cached deck never touches PowerPoint again, so it opens faster than the frame can draw.

• Thumbnails for the filmstrip and grid are rendered eagerly - they are cheap, so the whole deck's overview is available almost immediately.
• Full-resolution slides render on demand, and the next few slides are pre-rendered in the background so paging never stalls.
• Opening a deck that is not fully cached also quietly fills in the rest of it in the background, so any later jump is instant and the deck becomes offline-capable without you asking. Background work always yields to a render you are actually waiting on.
• Cache deck (P) does the same thing immediately, in the foreground.

Cache location: %APPDATA%\PPT Viewer\slide-cache. The sidebar shows its size. Prune deletes entries for decks that no longer exist or that were rendered by an older version; Clear cache wipes it.

A deck's cache key is a hash of its render version, path, byte size and modification time. Edit a deck in PowerPoint and it re-renders automatically - there is no refresh button to forget to press, and no risk of showing you a stale version. Nothing is ever written back to your original files; decks are opened strictly read-only.

PDF in the toolbar exports the current deck through PowerPoint's own PDF engine, so the output is identical to PowerPoint's Save as PDF.

src/
  main/
    main.js         Electron main: windows, IPC, private image protocol
    com-bridge.js   supervises the PowerShell worker (queue, timeouts, restart)
    deck-service.js deck identity, cache orchestration, render pipeline
    cache.js        content-addressed slide cache
    media.js        reads embedded media out of the OOXML package
    library.js      recursive scanner, repository discovery
    presenter.js    the second (presenter) window
    settings.js     persisted config
  worker/
    render-worker.ps1   persistent PowerPoint COM host
  preload/preload.js    the renderer's entire API surface
  renderer/
    index.html / app.js / styles.css    the library and viewer
    presenter.html / presenter.js       the presenter window

Four decisions carry most of the behaviour:

A persistent PowerPoint process. Starting the COM object costs 1.7 s. Rather than paying that per render, one PowerShell process is started once and holds the PowerPoint object for the app's lifetime, answering newline-delimited JSON requests over stdin/stdout. Every response is prefixed with a sentinel so stray PowerPoint output can never corrupt the protocol.

Rendering through PowerPoint, not a re-implementation. A from-scratch renderer would have to guess at SmartArt, custom fonts, master layouts and theme colours, and would be wrong often enough to be worse than useless. Using the real engine is the only way to actually get the fidelity you asked for.

Exports are sized from the deck, not from us. PowerPoint's export takes an explicit width and height, so the worker passes only a target long edge and derives the other dimension from the deck's own page setup. There is no longer any code path that can stretch a slide.

Two priority lanes. Anything you are waiting on renders interactively; the background fill runs at low priority between batches. Without the split, a 300-slide deck's worth of queued renders would sit in front of a single arrow key press.

Cached images are served over a private pptv:// protocol that refuses any path outside the cache directory, and which honours range requests so video can be seeked. The renderer runs with contextIsolation, no Node integration, and a restrictive CSP.

Engine pill says no engine PowerPoint is not installed, or Office automation is disabled. Confirm PowerPoint opens normally on its own first.

"PowerPoint automation is blocked" Office is not activated. Sign in to Office once, or run Office > Account > Update License, then restart the viewer. Fully cached decks still open fine in this state, since they need no PowerPoint at all.

"PowerPoint stopped responding" PowerPoint is probably sitting on a dialog it cannot show. The viewer detects the hang, restarts the worker automatically, and the operation is safe to retry.

A deck will not open The viewer reports PowerPoint's own explanation. Common causes: the file is corrupt or truncated, it is password-protected (remove the password in PowerPoint), or its extension does not match its actual internal format (a .pptx renamed to .ppt, say).

A video shows its poster frame and does not play Either the codec is one Chromium cannot decode (.avi, .wmv), or the media was in a part of the package the viewer does not read. The toolbar still names what is on the slide, which tells you whether it was found at all.

The engine pill flickers to restarting The worker exited and is being recycled. If it keeps happening, run PowerPoint once manually - a first-run or privacy dialog is the usual cause, and dismissing it once fixes it permanently.

• Media embedded in notes pages, slide masters or layouts is not extracted; only media attached to slides is.
• Presentation-level embedded objects (.pptm add-ins, OLE packages) are not supported, as they were not in version 1.
• There is still no auto-update; new versions are installed by hand.