PowerPoint is an application required to view PowerPoint presentations. Even if you embed it in a .NET application (written in C# or whatever other mangaged language), PowerPoint is still required to be installed on the client's machine. The installation source can be located on a network share, but it still needs to be installed on the client machine. And, yes, actually you can embed the PowerPoint Viewer in a .NET application, but that too would need to be installed on the client's machine. This is how COM works (basically). If you don't have PowerPoint available to all your clients on a network, you can download and install on each of their machines the PowerPoint 2003 Viewer[^], which can display PowerPoint slides from version '97 and newer (up till at least 2003).
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