You've spent hours creating a top class PowerPoint slide show which you're going to send to some friends or colleagues or you might want to make the presentation available in a folder on a shared drive and you're just not quite sure who has and who hasn't got PowerPoint installed on their PC. And even if you do know you may not know if it's PowerPoint 20003 or PowerPoint 2007.

One way to be ABSOLUTELY SURE the PowerPoint presentation will run on any PC is to use the excellent "Package for CD" feature in PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007. You could also use this facility to create archive folders of your PowerPoint presentations.

This feature will help you create a folder containing the relevant files which you can then burn to a CD and then send to your users. The CD will then auto-run your presentation. Alternatively you can make the folder itself available to your users directly. When you use "Package for CD" PowerPoint creates the normal PowerPoint slide show file along with a PowerPoint viewer and essential supporting files.

In this article we'll describe how to create the folder and then you can burn this to a CD yourself if you have the necessary CD burning software. You could burn the folder directly to CD by using "Burn to CD" option. Your users can then use the viewer to show the presentation irrespective of whether they have PowerPoint installed or not.

To use this feature we'll firstly create our slide show and then save it with an appropriate name. Suppose you've called it Demo1 for example. With the PowerPoint file still open, in PowerPoint 2003 choose File, Package for CD. In PowerPoint 2007 choose the Office Button, Publish, then select Package for CD.

In the Package for CD panel create a new folder name to the right of "Name the CD", such as Example1 and then click "Copy to Folder." PowerPoint is going to create a folder called Example1 to be saved at a specified location.

In the "Copy to Folder" panel the folder name will default to the name you just entered, Example1. Then click Browse and choose a folder where to save your work - note you need to select a target folder to put Example1 into, rather than open the target folder. To finish click OK. PowerPoint then creates all the required the files in a new folder called Example1 within the target folder you specified.

The support files, by the way, identify any links in the presentation and copy any required files to the folder automatically so you don't have to specify any other files to be included. The links in the created presentation are all pathless so everything works from the folder.

To test the viewer, close PowerPoint, then navigate to your new folder called Example1. Open it and you'll see a collection of files including the PowerPoint file DEMO1 and the viewer PPTVIEW. Double click the viewer, select Demo1 and click Open to view. Alternatively to start viewing you can carefully drag the PowerPoint file onto the viewer.

You can navigate through the presentation as if using PowerPoint, for example by using PgUp and PgDown keys or click the mouse buttons. But of course your users will not be able to edit the PowerPoint presentation, as PPTVIEW is only a viewer, but a very useful one.

Interestingly if you create the folder using PowerPoint2007, PowerPoint creates the viewable file in PowerPoint2003 format or you can view either 2003 or 2007 format files with either format viewer. To explore PowerPoint further consider attending a training course and learn more about PowerPoint's many really useful features.