No matter what you’re giving a presentation about, sometimes it can be useful to show your audience information from the internet.  You could always create a screenshot of the webpage you’re demonstrating, but chances are the screenshot may be out of date by the time you give your presentation.

A better solution is to use live information from the web in your presentation.  By default, PowerPoint doesn’t support inserting a live web page, but you can easily do this with the LiveWeb add-in.

Head to the LiveWeb website (link below), and download the correct version for your version of PowerPoint.  We selected the 2007/2010 version in this test.

Once it’s downloaded, extract the files as normal.

Now, in PowerPoint, open the Options window.  In PowerPoint 2010, you can do this by clicking the File button and selecting Options; in PowerPoint 2007, click the Office orb and select Options.

Select Add-Ins on the left side, then select PowerPoint Add-ins from the Manage menu, and click Go.

This will open the PowerPoint Add-ins window.  Click Add New to add the LiveWeb addin we downloaded previously.

Browse to the folder where you extracted the LiveWeb addin, and select it.

PowerPoint may warn you that the addon contains a macro.  Click Enable Macros to continue.

Now you should see LiveWeb listed in the Add-Ins window, and you’re ready to add a live webpage to your PowerPoint presentation.

Using LiveWeb in PowerPoint

Now that LiveWeb is installed, you’re ready to insert live internet data in your presentations.  From the Insert tab, select Web Page from the LiveWeb section.

This will open a quick Wizard interface that will help you insert a webpage into your presentation.

Enter the website you’d like to visit in the first line, then click the Add button.  Make sure to include http:// in front of the website address.  Once you’ve added the website you wish to visit, click Next.

LiveWeb will automatically refresh the web page, but if you want you can uncheck the box.  Click Next to continue.

Now choose how much of the slide you want the webpage to cover, and select where you want to position the page.  You can always change this later if you like.

Once it’s finished, click Finish to return back to PowerPoint.

LiveWeb will let you know it successfully added the web page to your slide.

You’ll now see a Windows 98-style logo in your slide, showing where your live webpage will be located.

Feel free to resize or move the webpage section in your slide however you want.

To view the actual web content, you’ll need to start a slideshow.  Click the slideshow button at the bottom of the window to switch quickly.

Now you’ll see a live webpage loaded right inside your PowerPoint presentation.  You can markup the slide as you would any other with PowerPoint tools, or you can interact with the website just as you would in a browser.

If you need to change your webpage, click the Edit Page Property button on the Insert tab.

Enter the new website address you want, and finish as before.

You can also add multiple web pages to a presentation if you’d like.  You could even make a webpage comparison like we did with screenshots in our first slide.  Only difference here is, the web pages are both live, and you could demonstrate how to use them to your audience.

When you save your presentation, you’ll need to save it as a Macro-enabled presentation in .pptm format to preserve the web data.  Note that you’ll be able to view the presentation on another computer only if it has the LiveWeb addon installed.  Since it’s a free addon, you could keep a copy of it on your flash drive so you could easily install it if you need to show your presentation on another computer.

Whether you’re trying to teach a class about computer usage or demonstrate your new website for your company’s board members, the LiveWeb addin makes it easy to incorporate live web pages in your presentations.  There are many ways you could use this, so let us know how you use live web pages in your presentations to make information come alive!

If you’d like to use live web data in other Office applications, here’s how you can Use Online Data in Excel 2010 Spreadsheets.

Download the LiveWeb Add-in for PowerPoint