Today, we expect our smartphones to be able to do it all, and they often do manage to fulfill our needs in situations that formerly would have required much heavier equipment. If you speak at conferences, present information at meetings, or otherwise use slideshow presentations, you can use your smartphone to enhance the presentation — or even, in some cases, use them in place of a laptop to output the slideshow.

Presentation apps

Assuming you’ve created the presentation on your computer, the first step is to get the presentation file onto your phone and be able to open it. Depending on your mobile operating system, you can transfer the file by connecting the phone to your computer via USB, wirelessly over Bluetooth, e-mail it to yourself, or put it into a cloud storage location or on a web server where you can download it to the phone. With Android phones, most of which have microSD cards, you can also transfer the files from your computer to the card (if your computer has an SD card reader) and then onto the phone that way.

There are dozens of apps with which you can view PowerPoint or OpenOffice presentations on your smartphone, whether it’s an Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone. Of course, Windows Phone has Office Mobile (including PowerPoint Mobile) built in. For Android, you can use ThinkFree Office Mobile Viewer, which is a “lite” (and free) version of ThinkFree Office.