Leading up to #SPSUK this weekend I was asked by one of the guys whether we could open 2 instances of PowerPoint simultaneously in Windows 8.

I’ve come across situations where I have had to solve this previously with Excel (mostly to get independent control of spreadsheet windows) so figured that the method I use for Excel would work for PowerPoint:

runas /user:powerpoint ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\POWERPNT.EXE’

Which it does.

Being a PowerShell fan, I figured I should really PoSh this up a little, not least of which because the command line of “runas” won’t let me (to the best of my knowledge) pass the password parameter in (it always prompts).

A little tinkering led me to:

$user = “powerpoint”
$pword = “pass@word1”
$creds = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList @($user,(ConvertTo-SecureString -String $pword -AsPlainText -Force))
Start-Process ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\POWERPNT.EXE’ -Credential ($creds)

For clarity, there is a local user called “powerpoint” with the password of “pass@word1” under which context PowerPoint will run.

What you might want to do with this information is entirely up to you!

more to follow…