How can I best host PowerPoint slides on a web side, interleaved with native HTML content?

Question

Many of my users prepare training presentations using PowerPoint. My training app presents content in a simple chapter-questions chapter-questions format, where a course module has many chapters, and each chapter is basically a web page for content, and a collection of questions or exercises for that content. I manage the questions individually, i.e. each question is it's own 'document', versus one content document and one questions document per chapter.

I need to offer some kind of import from PowerPoint which will allow a course author to break the PowerPoint presentation into chapters, i.e. groups of slides, and create a new set of question documents, basically as HTML text, so the flow of a course module is e.g.

chapter 1 intro - html
chapter 1 content - ppt
chapter 1 question html
chapter 1 question html

I realise I could convert the content PowerPoint to HTML, and treat the whole course as native content, but my users are much more familiar with PowerPoint as their content editor, versus ckeditor and my utilities. I want to only require the user to author their questions usign my editors, and then just manage the ppt content.

How can I go about this? I realise MS probably has something for hosting ppt content in web pages, and that there may be more open tools for this as well, but the latter isn't a requirement. A dependency on an MS tool, just not PowerPoint itself, is something I'm happy with.

Answer 1

Microsoft does support an embed option, but you have to own a skydrive account for it to work.

Outside of MS scribd and docstoc also enable you to share powerpoint slides - you can find some more ideas on our sister site stackOverflow

IMHO Scribd is the best of the bunch.

Answer 2

You can't embed Powerpoint files directly in an HTML document, but you can do things like pipe it through the Google Docs Viewer, which provides an embedding option. (It doesn't say so up front, but you'll see the code once you import the PPT. If you're going through a CMS, it should be simple enough to have the client upload the PPT files to the site, with you then constructing the necessary URLs via templating.

Slideshare, and other similar services, also allow for uploading Powerpoint files to them; you could set up and account and just set everything to private.

Answer 3

Web Browsers do not render Powerpoint Files, but if you still want the animation you can follow Su's answer above and or use the jQuery Presentation Plugin...

http://www.viget.com/inspire/jquery-presentation-plugin/