PowerPad helps you keep to your schedule while presenting by displaying your presentation progress, notes and preview of the next slide.
PowerPad is a simple and easy way to replicate the functionality of Powerpoints presenters view, though on your tablet or phone.
To download, check out the Releases page. No install is necessary, simply unpack and run.
- Supports Powerpoint 2013.
- Interface is available through any device with a browser - including iPads, iPhones as well as Android & Windows tablets & Phones.
- Automatically caches slides & detects changes when presentation starts.
- Handles flaky connections.
- Progress bar that shows presentation progress based on user defined start & end times.
- Progress bar that shows overall slide progress, contrasted with presentation time progress.
Instead of replicating the Powerpoint presenters view 1:1, I've aimed for showing just what's needed, and no more.
- At the back there's a full-size preview of the next slide.
- At the bottom you'll see the notes for the current slide (with Markdown support).
- At the top there are two progress bars, the top one showing your progress in time, the bottom one showing your progress in slides. Also, you'll see the current time as well as the presentation begin & end times here (both configurable - just press them).
Optimally you'll want to keep the two progress bars in sync (unless you have few slides that take disproportionally long time). If this is your situation, you're running behind.
Once you reach the end, PowerPad will notify you.
If you don't have a tablet by hand, you may even use the interface on your cell phone, though a larger display is preferable.
As soon as you start up PowerPad, it'll detect whether you're already running Powerpoint. If an instance is detected, PowerPad will conect to it and await for the presentation to begin.
If Powerpoint is not already running, Powerpad will launch it for you.
As can be seen in the green output, PowerPad will listen on any active IP address on port 8000, by default. At this point, as soon as you begin the presentation in Powerpoint, PowerPad will run through all slides and cache them.
Caching is a relatively quick process. It will however lock up Powerpoint while it's running, but as soon as it's done, you've got full control over Powerpoint and PowerPad will automatically detect which slide is the active one.
If you end the slideshow, perhaps for a demo, and restart it afterwards, PowerPad will detect this and continue its work in the background. If any slides have been changed in the meantime, they'll be cached again. Unchanged slides will be ignored, making this a very quick process.
Simply open up PowerPad.exe.config and change this line:
<appSettings>
<add key="Port" value="8000"/>
</appSettings>
Make sure to open up for the port in your firewall!
Simply tap on the times and enter them in 24H format like ##:## - 05:30, 14:15, 17:00, etc. PowerPad will set a cookie and remember the values even if you refresh the window.
Yes! PowerPad will handle any number of clients so you can hook up 15 phones and 5 tablets, should you want to. You can even give your attendees access!
PowerPad does not support the native rich text formatting that PowerPoint stores, but it will render Markdown. If you just write your notes in Markdown format, they will be shown as such in the PowerPad interface.
Making Powerpoint render a slide locks up Powerpoint for just a short moment. Unfortunately this is enough to cause some problems with clickers and changing slides using the keyboard. As such, aggressively caching seems to be the only stable method.
You sure can - just edit the static files in the Frontend directory. If you make any general fixes or additions, please consider submitting them back to the project.
- Powerpoint 2013
- .NET Framework 2.0
- Firewall setup to allow clients on the configured port (8000 by default).
One of the design guidelines for PowerPad is to keep it as absolutely simple as possible, though no simpler than that. Given that, I still have a couple of features in mind that I'd like to add (feel free to help, if you feel like it).
- Support for at least Powerpoint 2010. This should be simple as the interop functionality is pretty much the same.
- Multiple views that can be access by just invoking a special URL.
- Display of current slide and nothing else.
- Display of next slide and nothing else.
- More or less exact replica of Powerpoints presenters view - good if you have a secondary laptop for showing the interface.
For any questions, issues or suggestions, please contact me at
- Mail: [email protected]
- Twitter: @improvedk
- Blog: improve.dk