<p>Is there any good way to use a windows application written in C# to display/control a powerpoint slideshow? Ultimately I would like to show thumbnails in a form and clicking these thumbnails would advance the slides shown on a second monitor (similar to using Powerpoint itself to show a slideshow on a second monitor).</p>

<p>I would like to be able to use Powerpoint Viewer if Powerpoint is not installed.</p>

<p>There seems to be some ActiveX-controls that allows integration of Powerpoint in a form, but most of these seem to cost money, does anyone have experience using one of these controls?</p>

<p>Edit: I know that there is an object model accessable by adding a reference to Microsoft.Office.InterOp.Powerpoint, but I want to be able to distribute the resulting program without having Microsoft Office as a prerequisite, that was why I mentioned Powerpoint Viewer because it can be distributed freely.</p>

One of our softwares here at work does that. Initially we used MS Office but recently we switched to use
OpenOffice.org Uno
since it offers better control than MS Office and is easier to work with. It has
.NET CLI-bindings
.
To answer your question, yes it can be done but our engineers would recommend you use OpenOffice.org instead.