PowerPoint for Digital Signage: How to Share Slides on a TV

PowerPoint’s not only synonymous with presentations, it’s also one of the easiest ways to quickly put nicely formatted text and graphics on a screen. If you want to quickly turn your computer into digital signage, you could open PowerPoint, type a few lines of text, click the Present button, and you’ve got a full-screen announcement.

But you’ve got work to do on your computer. Why not get the PowerPoint running on your office TVs and signage, so your team can see your slides and ideas whenever they look up?

Here’s how to put a slideshow on a TV, and turn your slides into a presentation kiosk, with ScreenCloud.

Getting the Most Out of Your Slides

Slides aren’t all that complicated—or at least, they shouldn’t be.

10 slides, for a 20-minute talk, with a 30-point font size—that was the classic PowerPoint formula Guy Kawasaki recommended. “Make it legible, simple, and obvious,” recommends the YC team. “Keep your slides simple and succinct,” recommends the team behind TED Talks. “The golden rule is to have one claim or idea per slide.”

Yet sometimes it’s harder to make something short and concise than something long and verbose. “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short,” explained Henry David Thoreau in his version of the popular quote.

But it’s worth putting in the time to make great slides for those most important presentations—your quarterly updates, product launches, project updates, and more. And once you’ve made something that’s perfect for your keynote or boardroom address, it’s worth getting the most out of those slides. Few in your team have the time to go back and rewatch an all-hands meeting; fewer would think to open your PowerPoint deck and flip through the slides.

Put your slides on digital signage, though, and your concise points will be re-emphasized throughout the week while your team goes about their work.

Add a PowerPoint File to ScreenCloud

The good news is, you don’t need a computer running PowerPoint to be your slideshow player. All you need is ScreenCloud’s digital signage software powering your company’s signage—and a PowerPoint file.

The easiest way to auto-play a PowerPoint presentation on your TV is with ScreenCloud’s built-in support for PowerPoint files.

Open ScreenCloud, navigate to the Media tab, click Upload, then drag and drop in your PowerPoint files. Click your presentation to preview it, to make sure your fonts and images all look great (and if anything looks off, open your file in PowerPoint, make some tweaks, then save and re-upload the file).

Then, update your ScreenCloud Playlist or Channel with your PowerPoint file. For most apps, ScreenCloud will let you set how long the app will show on your screen, but for PowerPoint, you can set how long you want each slide to show. By default, ScreenCloud will show each slide for 10 seconds—which means a 10-slide deck would play for just over a minute and a half.

Preview your updated playlist or channel, and you’ll see how your slides will look on your digital signage before you go live.

Do note that ScreenCloud doesn’t support all of PowerPoint’s features. It only supports default PowerPoint fonts—so a custom font for your brand may not render correctly. It also does not support animations, transitions, or embeds. But ScreenCloud does render PowerPoint files almost exactly the same as they look in PowerPoint—and it automatically flips through your slide deck to make sure your team sees every point you made in your talk.

Also, if you update your PowerPoint presentation, you’ll need to re-upload it to ScreenCloud’s Media player and update your playlist or channel with the new deck.

Export a PowerPoint Slideshow as a Video or GIF

If you really want to showcase your PowerPoint slides with animations, there is a workaround: Video.

You can export your PowerPoint presentation as a video or GIF, then upload it to ScreenCloud to loop on your signage. Your slides will look exactly like they do in PowerPoint—custom fonts and all—and you’ll get the animations you wanted to help highlight your ideas.

If you haven’t already, open your PowerPoint, and in the Animation and Transitions tabs set your slides and elements to advance automatically after the number of seconds you set. Then, in your Export options, choose to export as a video or a GIF—and set how many seconds to show any slides where you didn’t add animations.

Now, back in ScreenCloud, upload your video to the Media tab (or upload your GIF to OneDrive and select it from ScreenCloud’s OneDrive app). Add the exported presentation to your Channels and Playlists to showcase your slides with every animation and custom font you want.

Convert Your PowerPoint to Google Slides

The best way to put presentations on digital signage would be with a web app—and PowerPoint Web App is a handy, free way to make PowerPoint presentations and collaboration on them online. But PowerPoint’s Web App’s embed tool unfortunately only works if you click to the next slide or press your arrow keys—something that wouldn’t work for automated digital signage.

Instead, you can switch to a (free) competitor. Google Slides supports PowerPoint files, and it makes it much easier to embed your slideshow and collaborate on your slides online. You’ll have a few of the same problems with PowerPoint files in Google Slides as in ScreenCloud, though: Custom fonts and most animations won’t work in Google Slides. But what will work better is that you can edit your slides in Google Slides, then a moment later the new version will automatically show up on your ScreenCloud signage. That, alone, might be worth the switch.

To migrate your PowerPoint presentation to Google Slides, open Google Drive, and drag-and-drop in your PowerPoint file. Open it in Google Slides, then in the File menu choose Save as Google Slides to convert your deck. Tweak any text or images that might be oddly sized or misplaced after the import.

Then, copy the link to the new Google Slides copy of your presentation, and paste it into ScreenCloud’s Google Slides app. Updating then is as easy as opening Google Slides, tweaking anything you want, then ScreenCloud will automatically show the latest version of your slides on your signage.

Want to set how long each slide will play? First note how many slides are in your presentation—and multiply that by how many seconds you want each slide to be displayed. Then, when you add the Google Slides app to your ScreenCloud channel or playlist, set the app to show for as long as you calculated. It’s a bit of a workaround, but gets the same results as ScreenCloud’s PowerPoint slide time settings.

Run PowerPoint in Kiosk Mode

Or, there’s one more option if you do have a spare PC around, and want to run your PowerPoint presentation natively on a TV. To do that, you’ll want to use PowerPoint’s built-in Kiosk mode to loop a PowerPoint slideshow.

Set up your presentation as before, with timed animations and transitions. Then, from PowerPoint’s Slide Show tab, choose Set up Slide Show. There, choose the kiosk mode, and set your slideshow to automatically loop until someone presses the Esc key, and to use your pre-set timings for slides.

Then, connect your computer to your TV, click PowerPoint’s Slide Show button, and your screen will play your presentation, animations and all, until you come back and quit the playback. It’s a bit more trouble and takes more hardware, but is the only official way to automatically play a PowerPoint presentation.

Put Your Presentations on Digital Signage

Those tricks are great for when you want to share a finished presentation with your team. But what if the big presentation’s coming up soon, and you’d like to stream it live across your company for everyone who can’t make the event?

You can do that, too. ScreenCloud’s Broadcast app can stream live Zoom events, Microsoft Team calls, and OBS live broadcasts to share your internal presentations. Or, use ScreenCloud’s YouTube Live integration to push your public keynote addresses and conferences to your company’s signage.

No more hunting for HDMI cables to hook up a laptop last-minute to a TV to share a live stream or put PowerPoint on the big screen. With ScreenCloud, any screen in your company can be the canvas to showcase your presentations.

Image Credit: Header image by charlesdeluvio via Unsplash