I run a non-profit and someone donated a Lenovo laptop that we use to present slides on our group at trade shows etc. Our presentation is only 15 slides long, so I need it to keep looping all day long.
The laptop didn’t come with MS Office or 365 so at the time the only choice I had was to use an online version of PowerPoint, which was free, but it didn’t have the capability to loop. That meant I had to keep restarting the presentation every 15 minutes.
I’m looking for a full-featured version of PowerPoint, and it can be read-only since I develop the content on my home PC, but I don’t want to pay $129 to Microsoft to get it.
Does anyone know if there is a free or cheap PowerPoint display application that has the looping feature? Or is there another technology that would work just as well that I should be using instead? Like a PDF reader that can run in slideshow mode? Any advice would be appreciated.
Both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free, open-source office suites that include full-featured, PowerPoint-compatible presentation apps. I haven’t checked into that auto-looping feature specifically, but I’d be pretty surprised if either of those programs didn’t have it. Both office suites are basically at feature parity with Microsoft Office.
When you open your presentation with either of those, you might find some formatting irregularities, but those are easy to fix. Then you can save the presentation with the fixes and never have to touch it again.
LibreOffice is an excellent 100% free alternative to MS Office. It has a presentation feature similar to PowerPoint, and I think it will open existing PowerPoint presentations. It does have looping.
Might be worth exporting your PowerPoint presentation to a video (pretty sure LibreOffice can also do this). There’s a billion programs that will loop a video forever and many smart TVs can do so if the file in on USB key so you wouldn’t even need the laptop.
Even if the TV can’t loop it, you can probably fit 1000 hours long PowerPoint video on an $8 USB key these days.
Thanks, everyone. I’ll try LibreOffice and report back. It sounds too good to be true.
There are also low- or no cost ways to get Office for a non-profit organization.
LibreOffice works! Problem solved. Ignorance fought.
I’m glad it worked out for you!
Google Slides is also free. Google’s free publishing software is modeled after MS Office.
Google docs = MS Word
Google sheets = Excel
Google slides = PPT
and so on.
Glad it works. I’ve used LibreOffice a lot - there are some complicated PowerPoint features that don’t display correctly, so check carefully, but it is in general pretty good.
The history: it began as StarOffice, which was a German company. Sun Microsystems bought it to fight Windows in part, and OpenOffice was the open source spinoff. When Oracle bought Sun Oracle, not a fan of open source, starved OpenOffice and LibreOffice took the code over. LibreOffice is by far the best one to use.