PowerPoint presentations are ideal ways to share information with a large group of people. Not only can you present business ideas and strategies, but you can also use it as a tool for training purposes. 

You'll need a laptop or desktop, projector, a screen to project onto, and any cables needed to power them all up. If you also have an iPad, you now have a much simpler solution. Even though your iPad isn’t able to play Powerpoint slides out-of-the-box, there are some simple ways to still get your iPad to correctly play back your Powerpoint presentations. This enables you to ditch that laptop, and directly connect your iPad to your projector. 

Not only will this greatly reduce the number of cables and heavy equipment, it will also look very sophisticated. This guide will provide you with at quick step-by-step way on how to show PowerPoint slides using your iPad.

If you have Keynote installed on your iPad, you can open a PowerPoint file within Keynote, then use the Keynote functions to play your presentation.http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1369

1. To start displaying a slide show in Keynote, select the slide you want to begin with, and then tap Play button in the toolbar.
2. To proceed to the next slide, tap or swipe left.
3. To return to the previous slide, swipe right.
4. To end the slideshow, double-tap anywhere on the screen.http://help.apple.com/iwork/safari/interface/#tan72233051

Third party programs also exist to assist you with your presentation. MightyMeeting for iPad is a program that allows you to view PowerPoint presentations on the iPad. You can also use MightyMeeting to project the presentation through a projector with iPad's VGA output.http://www.ipadforums.net/ipad-general-discussions/1375-powerpoint-keynote.htmlhttp://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mightymeeting-for-ipad/id364897044?mt=8

Your iPad is equipped with a slide show photo viewer. By saving your slides as pictures you can use your slide show to automatically or manually cycle through your PowerPoint slides. Some advantages of using stills are:

• Higher quality: Photos can be of very high quality. Don’t go higher than the output-quality of your beamer though, as a higher resolution won’t improve, and might even damage the output result.
• Better control: When cycling through your PowerPoint stills manually, you can to a high degree influence the pacing of the rotation. Use this to your advantage, to pace your story, skipping through, or lingering on pages if needed.
• Less memory usage: Even though your iPad comes equipped with 16, 32 of even 64 GB of memory, you might have much of that memory already filled with apps, videos or music. Stills will use memory, but way less than video, especially when using jpeg format.

However, there are also some disadvantages with using stills:

• Stills are not dynamic. If you fancy using lots of on-screen trickery like moving blocks or text, you’ll feel limited using stills. Some dynamics can be faked by rotating several stills for the same slide, but moving objects are simply impossible with this option.
• As you can’t use a remote with your iPad, you need to either yourself or an assistant, to manually skip though the slides. Alternatively, you can set the slideshow to automatic, but then you lose the flexibility to time your slides.
• If you want or need to control the flow of your presentation, switch to manual, and if possible ask assistance for paging through to the next slide.

Please note the following:

• Ensure your slides are separated from other pictures you store on your iPad. Nothing is more embarrassing than accidentally showing your holiday pictures (or worse) as part of your presentation. Preferrably, keep your presentation slides in a separate folder on your iPad.
• Make sure your slideshow rotates in the correct order . There are several options available, from date created to alphabetically. Select the correct one, and ensure your pictures are ordered that way too.

In order to convert your PowerPoint slideshow to stills, use the following steps:

1. Start up PowerPoint, and open up (File > Open) your presentation
2. Export the slides using File > Save As...
3. At the pop-up, Select the “Save as type”, and choose “*.jpg”.
4. When PowerPoint asks whether you want to export all slides, choose “Every Slide”. Your slides are now exported. PowerPoint will tell you where the stills have been stored. By default, they are named “Slide x.JPG”
5. Now, open iTunes
6. Select File > Preferences
7. Choose the iPad tab, and “Photos”.
8. Select the folder where PowerPoint stored the stills, and press “Ok” twice (once to start importing, once to confirm the completion of the import).
9. Once you synchronize your iPad (check How to sync your iPad with Windows if you don’t know how to synchronize), your presentation will be on your iPad, ready to be used at presentation time.

At presentation time, connect your iPad using the Dock (or directly), and connect it to the video-in of your projector or television.

In addition to performing a photo slide-show, your iPad is able to play-back videos. By converting your PowerPoint presentation to a video, you will be able to play back the entire slide show just like intended, including fixed timings and on-screen gadgetry provided by PowerPoint.

Using video allows you to:

• Use dynamic slides and trickery provided by PowerPoint. This may be very useful in certain situations, as long as you don’t overdo it. Having a slide appear part-by-part however, is a very handy trick to have your audience concentrate on what you are talking about.
• Exactly time your presentation. This can be a blessing or a curse. When using a video, the only way to break for questions, is by actually pausing the presentation. Skipping or going back to a another slide requires forwarding/rewinding., which is a lot more fiddly than using stills.

However, it also means:

• More memory usage: Video inherently uses up more memory space than stills, and if your presentation runs for a prolonged time, you may easily get cramped for space
• Lower resolution: To keep memory usage in bounds, video is almost always reduced in its resolution. A lower, more compressed video may appear blocky or cramped.

There is no one way to tell you how to convert your PowerPoint presentation to video, as there are many different (paid or free) programs that will allow this. One of these programs is the free-to-try “Super Screen Capture”, which allows both Windowed capturing and full screen recording. However, other options are available too.

1. In general, you start recording with the Screen Grabber program (usually a hotkey), as soon as you start playback of your PowerPoint presentation.
2. Once your presentation is fully played out, you stop recording again (again, usually with a hotkey), and your grabbing software will create the video for you.
3. If required, you can then edit your video, to isolate the actual presentation, using Video Editing software like the free Microsoft Movie Maker.
4. Once created and edited, your video is ready for transfer to your iPad. Open up iTunes,
5. Select File > Preferences
6. Choose the iPad tab, and “Video”.
7. Select the folder where your edited video is stored, and press “Ok” twice (once to start importing, once to confirm the completion of the import).
8. Once you synchronize your iPad, your presentation video will be on your iPad, ready to be used at presentation time.

Same as with the still images option, at presentation time, you need to connect your iPad using the Dock (or directly), and connect it to the video-in of your projector or television. Play back the video to start your presentation.