PDA for Powerpoint presentations

Are you tired of lugging your laptop into class in for PowerPoint presentations? Did you know that you can use your PDA instead? Your options depend on the type of PDA that you have. If you have one which already has a Compact Flash Card slot, you can purchase a device which will fit in the CF slot. Ia Presenter, Margi and Voyager offer some options.

If you do not have the CF card slot (like a Compac IPAQ) you will need something like the Life View Fly Jacket.

Each of the devices should come with the software necessary to make the conversion from PowerPoint to PDA format.

Fly Jacket comes with Ia Presenter but there are some limitations to the conversion. It will not convert most slide animations. So, if you want to add items to a list one at a time, you have to actually create a whole new slide for each addition and just build as you go. It’s inconvenient but not impossible. According to Ia Style, the newest version of Ia Presenter does support animations but Fly Jacket has not updated their driver to support the newer version. IaStyle has just begun marketing their own Presenter CF VGA Card which they say will support the newest version of Ia Presenter.

Both Margi and Voyager are supposed to work with Pocket Slide Show which also claims to support animations.