Wireless Control of PowerPoint from Zaurus?

dancedance asks: "I am a high school student who is very involved in the AV at my local church. We use PowerPoint on a weekly basis in our service, and also in our high school program. I would like to be able to control PowerPoint- similar to the way that Slide Show Commander works- from my Zaurus PDA using a WiFi connection. I am working on an open source Java application to do this, but I am struggling on how to get the full text/ view of the slides out of PowerPoint. Any Suggestions on this, or any aspect of my project would be useful."

ActiveX

[Hubble]

The easiest way to solve this problem is probably by using ActiveX and COM technology.

This will allow you to display and control a Powerpoint window (control) within your own application. Then you only need to map incomming commands from the Zaurus to Powerpoint.

I'd recommend reading MSDN [microsoft.com] for futher information.

Re:ActiveX

[Gaijin42]

Yeah, because ActiveX and COM both work so well from within the Zaurus... That doesn't run windows...

I don't know what the memory/speed of the machine is off hand, but if it could handle a terminal services client, or vnc client, then that would be easy, and you could just remote into your main computer and control from there. As an added benefit you could control other programs as well.

Re:ActiveX

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Simple. A PowerPoint COM interface runs on the PowerPoint server and communicates with the Zaurus with HTTP or your choice of other fine open protocols.

I could hack up one in VB in ten minutes.

Re:ActiveX

[good-n-nappy]

I think the point was to write an application in Windows to interface with PowerPoint then write some kind of protocol to communicate between the Zaurus and the Windows app.

You could get something very simple working very quickly - for example getting the text out of the slides. Here [microsoft.com] is a link that will get you started creating a COM Addin for PowerPoint (using Visual Studio). I would recommend creating the Windows side of your app using Visual Basic. Yes, Visual Basic isn't sexy but you can have a working PowerPoint add-in in about 10 minutes. To communicate with the Zaurus, you'll probably want to use a MS Winsock control. Again, this is a standard MS thing so you can just plug it in.

Once you have the MS side working as your PowerPoint server, you just create a client on your Zaurus to talk to the server. Java would probably work nicely for that. (Theoretically, you could also create the add-in to PowerPoint using Java but you'll waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to use COM in Java. And since you're using a MS product anyway, why not go whole hog, eh?)

Try VNC first and if you don't have enough bandwidth for some reason, go with this route.

VNC?

[bmasonnz]

What about VNC? There is version for PalmOS so there is probably one for the Zaurus.

Re:VNC?

[erpbridge]

Does the Zaurus have a built-in web browser for use over said wi-fi network? VNC has a built-in Java Applet web server (I believe default port is 5800).

Sure, it's got only 256 color, and the response time is less than that of normal VNC, but he WAS asking for a Java applet.

Better options than PowerPoint

[riggwelter]

I head up the Word Projecttion team at Soul Survivor [soulsurvivor.com], and we use Presenter [discoverysystems.com.au] from Discovery Systems in Australia to display the song words. (I'm assuming this is for song display in worship). It's a much better tool than PowerPoint for this job for a few reasons:

• It's cheaper ;-)
  
• It's designed with this purpose in mind - you have 'random' access within songs, and quick access to other songs should your Worship Leader deviate from his/her songlist.
  
• It allows different displays for control, front of house and foldback
  
  • 
    As for the remote control on your Zaurus, go for VNC, you can get it from Zaurus Zone [zauruszone.com] and, of course, it's free.

File Format

[Samus]

It sounds like you want to get the file format for power point. What I know is that Office files are stored in a structured format like a file system. There is a project on the Apache Jakarta [slashdot.org] website that has been reverse engineering many of these file formats. They have been collaborating with the open source office guys so the library should be fairly decent. I haven't tried it myself though.

Re:File Format

[Samus]

sorry should have previewed. Apache Jakarta [apache.org]

Keep It Simple

[ishmalius]

I would suggest that you keep it as simple as possible. I have done things like this before, and it is not hard.

Try, either by some VB for Applications script within Powerpoint, or an ActiveX component dragged onto it, to periodically poll a web application, asking "what do I do next" . The web app can return strings like "slide 1" "slide 2" or "go back" ... stuff like that.

The same app would have a page associated with it, with form controls used to set the current command.

Example:

1. Browser displays the control page generated by the webapp, including the button "next slide".

2. User hits the button, sending the form back to the web app. The "next slide" command is stored.

3. The VB script, or ActiveX component fetches the "next slide" command.

4. The script tells PowerPoint to turn the page.

This should fit in to your desire to do the thing in Java, since the web app could easily be a servlet. In addition, the server could be on the same machine that is displaying the slides.

One benefit of this is that creating your own GUI would be unnecessary. Even better, no code is necessary for the Zaurus! Just use the Opera browser, and you're done!.

Hope this helps.

I don't know the Zaurus, but:

[terpia]

PowerPoint advances and reverses several ways; right and left clicks, pageup/pagedn, n/p etc. Why don't you just setup a link to transmit keystrokes?

Or better yet, buy a good remote: http://www.gyration.com [gyration.com]