Updated October 14, 2026. Written for DeckCraft 0.6.1 (what changed since).
Two checks before you present
Fonts. The browser editor has one Latin typeface, Inter, in regular and bold. Text set in anything else (Calibri, Aptos, Times New Roman, a company font) is shown in Inter. The risk is a long title that now wraps onto a second line, or bullets that run past the bottom of their box. Click through every slide once in the editor and shorten or resize what spills over.
Notes. Presenter View, the screen with your notes, the next slide and a timer, is a desktop feature that opens in a second window. Don't plan on it in a browser. Turn the Presenter View button off on the Slide Show tab, and bring your notes on paper: export Notes Pages as a PDF and print it, or open it on your phone.
Steps to present a .pptx in the browser
- Open the editor on the computer you will present from. Use a current Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari; DeckCraft draws with WebGPU, or WebGL2 where WebGPU isn't available. The first visit downloads about 12 MB, so do it before the talk, while you have a good connection. A browser with neither WebGPU nor WebGL2 shows a message in place of the app; try another browser on the same machine.
- Open the deck. Click the Home icon at the top left of DeckCraft and choose Open…, or drag the .pptx onto the window. A .ppsx slide show opens as an ordinary deck; it doesn't start playing on its own.
- Turn off Presenter View on the Slide Show tab.
- Click Full screen in the site's top bar, above DeckCraft. The editor takes over the whole display.
- Start the show. Press F5, or click Play from Start on the Slide Show tab. Shift+F5 (or Ctrl+Enter, Cmd+Enter on a Mac) starts from the selected slide.
- Finish with Esc. It ends the show and leaves full screen, sometimes over two presses.
Keys during the show
| To do this | Press |
|---|---|
| Next step or slide | Click, Space, Right or Down arrow, Page Down, N, Enter |
| Previous step or slide | Right-click, Left or Up arrow, Page Up, P, Backspace |
| Jump to a slide | Type its number, then Enter |
| First or last slide | Home, End |
| Black or white screen | B or period, W or comma (press again to return) |
| Pen, back to the arrow, erase all ink | Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac), Ctrl+A (Cmd+A), E |
| End the show | Esc or the minus key |
A presentation remote that sends Page Up and Page Down works like the arrow keys.
On a projector or a TV
With the displays mirrored, the audience sees exactly what you see, and there is nothing else to set up. With an extended desktop, full screen fills whichever screen the browser window is on: drag the window onto the projector's screen first, then click Full screen. Your laptop screen then shows the desktop, not notes, which is another reason to have the Notes Pages PDF in hand.
What plays, and what doesn't
All 48 of PowerPoint's transitions play, Morph included (see adding Morph and other transitions), though transition sounds are silent. Animations play with their triggers, by-paragraph builds and motion paths. Hidden slides are skipped, links to other slides work, and web and email links open in a new tab. Set Up Slide Show can loop the deck until Esc, and Rehearse Timings records how long you spend on each slide. For a shorter version of the talk, Custom Show on the Slide Show tab plays a chosen set of slides without deleting the others.
Embedded audio in MP3, AAC, FLAC, ALAC, Ogg, Opus, WAV or AIFF plays, and so does video in H.264, HEVC, VP9 or AV1. Windows Media files (WMV, WMA) stay in the deck but don't play, and online videos such as YouTube embeds aren't supported. Convert those clips to MP4 before the talk.
Some things are missing compared with PowerPoint:
- No laser pointer or highlighter; the pen is the only ink tool.
- No grid of all slides and no zooming into part of a slide during the show. Type a slide number and press Enter to jump instead.
- EMF and WMF pictures, common in decks made on Windows, show as blank.
- Nothing is saved between visits. If you fix slides before the talk, export a .pptx copy or save a .deckcraft file before closing the tab.
When the desktop app is the better choice
If you present from your own laptop every week, install DeckCraft (free for Windows, macOS and Linux). Presenter View opens in its own window there, although it doesn't move itself to your screen yet: drag it across once the show starts. The desktop app also uses the fonts installed on your computer, so a deck in Calibri keeps Calibri if you have it, and AutoRecover keeps unsaved work after a crash. On a borrowed or locked-down machine, the browser editor is the one you can use.
Whichever you use, keep a backup: export the deck as a Full Page Slides PDF and put it on a USB stick. Any computer can show a PDF full screen if something goes wrong.