PowerPoint on Apple TV: How-to Guide

May 11, 2012 by

Apple TV 2nd Generation

Image provided by: Wikipedia

Displaying PowerPoint on Apple TV isn’t a difficult process, but it’s not as straight forward as you might think. We recently picked up a few new Apple TV’s for the OpenView Labs & Studios offices’. We love the idea of rotating photos, informational slides and videos on TV screens around the office, so we decided to set up a PowerPoint template to make it very easy for writers and event planners to publish content to our TVs.

The process to get PowerPoint on Apple TV is surprisingly undocumented. Thankfully, Macworld has a great article on displaying presentations via Apple TV that helped. For this reason I’ve decided to share my process here to hopefully make it easier for you to display a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation on an Apple TV.

What You’ll Need

This tutorial assumes you have:

PowerPoint on Apple TV Step by Step Instructions

After you have created a PowerPoint presentation, you can follow this process to get it set up as a slideshow on the Apple TV(s):

  1. Go to File Save As, and select PNG from the Format drop down. This will export each slide as an image.
  2. Open up iTunes, go to the iTunes Store and log in with the same account you currently use on your Apple TV.
  3. Open up iPhoto, create a new album, and import the photos.
  4. Go to File Export, choose Slideshow, and click the Apple TV column to optimize the images for display on the Apple TV. Be sure the Automatically send slideshow to iTunes box is checked.
  5. To view your “presentation” on the Apple TV, select the synced album from the Apple TV’s Photos menu. Note: If you want to navigate through the slides with your Apple TV clicker, rather than automatically transitioning to the next, immediately press the Play/Pause button to pause playback; you can then use the Back and Forward buttons to navigate your slides.
  6. That’s it, all done!

Hopefully this makes it nice and easy to create PowerPoint on Apple TV presentations for your school, office, or home! We’re very excited to begin using these at our upcoming workshops, forums, and events.

Weekly Email Newsletter OpenView Blog RSS Feed

Subscribe with RSS or Email to get the best new ideas for
building great technology companies delivered to you.

Tagged in

Discussion

  • http://twitter.com/carscreen carscreen

    great tutorial..I struggled with it before, it’s quite easy actually…thank you ! Barry@ http://www.carscreen.nl

  • Ettore

    Thank you for taking the time to post this. Very helpful. I had one question, is there a way to playback from a directly connected source such as a USB drive? I have a school that does not want to be held hostage if the internet goes down or
    iTunes is unavailable.