Can I view PowerPoint presentations without having Microsoft PowerPoint?

That's a great question because there's a little-known set of applications that Microsoft has made available to let you view presentations made in this popular application without actually having the app on your computer.

Before we go there, though, I should highlight that since PowerPoint is the de facto standard for presentation software, every other presentation app has to be able to read and understand PPT files too. This means that if you want to dabble with something like Apple Keynote or even an open source app like Open Office you'll be ready to go!

Further, most of the time when someone is going to distribute a presentation, they can often save it as a standalone file that doesn't require the recipient to have MS PowerPoint running. For example, in the Save As... dialog box of the Mac OS X version, you can find a variety of different formats, as explained by Microsoft in its help documentation:

That's not what you asked me, though, so let me just point you to the spot on the Microsoft site where you can download PowerPoint viewer apps: PowerPoint Viewer 2007. If you're on a Mac or want a Mac version of the Viewer you're out of luck, though. They do have one here: PowerPoint Viewer for Mac, but it's from 2003.

The best recommendation I can find? Use Google Docs or Keynote.

Hope that helps you out and gives you many options for dealing with this in the future.