Displaying a PowerPoint slide in a Page Viewer Web Part

Bottom line… this is FAR more difficult than it needs to be… 😦

The straightforward (and intuitive) way to do it would be to create a new page and add a Page Viewer web part:

Next, go out to one of your document libraries, open up the PowerPoint file in browser mode, and get the URL:

That gives you a URL that looks somewhat like the following: http://domain.com/sites/DuffTeamSite/_layouts/PowerPoint.aspx?PowerPointView=ReadingView&PresentationId=%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%20Documents%2FEthicsCOISharePointaloozaBranson2014%2Epptx&source=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain%2Ecom%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%2520Documents%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx

No problem, right? Actually, major problem, as it gives you the following error:

What you have to do instead is search the page source code to find the iframe tag. It’s within there that you’ll find the actual code you’re looking for:

In this case, the iframe code for my PowerPoint file is:

PowerPointFrame.aspx?PowerPointView=ReadingView&d=F4d0845e366cf4196adc344c19238f728md26da0e52012465c8dbe3c9d5cafe974m07df9f35b715495798c790767e0515a8m&source=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain%2Ecom%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%2520Documents%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx” width=”100%” height=”100%” style=”position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; bottom: 0px;” frameborder=”0″>

From that, you have to take a snippet of that code above (in bold green) and add the bold purple code below to get the following for your page URL:

/sites/duffteamsite/_layouts/PowerPointFrame.aspx?PowerPointView=ReadingView&d=F4d0845e366cf4196adc344c19238f728md26da0e52012465c8dbe3c9d5cafe974m07df9f35b715495798c790767e0515a8m&source=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain%2Ecom%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%2520Documents%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx

Once you have that completed, you can use that URL as the address for your web page to show (in this case, your slides):

To get it to be a bit more visible, adjust the height and width parameters of the web part:

This is how I have to set up PowerPoint page viewer web parts in SharePoint 2010. I certainly hope it gets more intuitive in upcoming versions.