What are the PowerPoint Viewer command line options?
Microsoft retired the free PowerPoint Viewer in 2018. It is no longer available to download and is not supported on current Windows. For a disc that plays on every PC, export your presentation as an MP4 video or a PDF; see Do my customers need PowerPoint installed?
Command line options for PowerPoint itself
If your users have PowerPoint (desktop or Microsoft 365), you can launch POWERPNT.EXE with a switch. In the AutoRun File Properties, set the File to Autorun to POWERPNT.EXE, check Allow file to exist outside of Base Folder, and put the switch and your file in the Command Line box, for example /S "%BASE_FOLDER%Sales.pptx".
| Switch | What it does |
|---|---|
/S "file.pptx" | Opens the presentation straight into the slide show. |
/O "file.pptx" | Opens the presentation normally. |
/P "file.pptx" | Prints the presentation. |
POWERPNT.EXE lives in a different folder for each Office version, so the path is not the same on every PC. The simpler route is to save the presentation as a PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) and autorun the file itself: it opens straight into the slide show wherever PowerPoint is installed.
The retired PowerPoint Viewer switches (reference)
Older discs launched pptview.exe, the PowerPoint 2003/2007 Viewer. Its switches were:
| Switch | What it did |
|---|---|
/S | Start without the splash screen. |
/L "Playlist.txt" | Play a list of presentations, one file name per line, in order. |
/N# | Open at slide number #, for example /N5. |
/P | Print the presentation. |
/D | Show the Open dialog when the slide show ends. |
The even older PowerPoint 97 Viewer (ppview32.exe) used /A to start automatically. Neither viewer can be downloaded today.