Have any of you used a foot pedal to advance powerpoint screens in Zoom?

​@Cheri Romain ,

welcome to the community.

The answer is yes.

• The simplest way to do this is the foot pedal from Elgato (part of its Stream Deck lineup); then you need some software to control PowerPoint. Again, the simplest is to just make the pedal activate the standard keypresses.
• There is something called Bitfocus Companion that allows control of many hardware controllers.
• My own tool allows control of PowerPoint with an app, streamdeck devices and even from another user in the meeting. But we won't release that till September.
  Maybe we can get a beta version for you to try.
• Zoom has its own remote control, but I dont know how we get that to a footpedal

All the best

John Drinkwater

Zoom Community Super Champion

I am not a Zoom Employee

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johndrinkwaterlordzoom/

https://www.youtube.com/@boomwithlordzoom

In a local presentation, left and right arrows on your keyboard control slide movement for every large presentation platform (PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, etc).

Per https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0061986, Slide Control for remote presentations is also possible via left/right arrows.

So this distills down to a need for left/right arrow keypress emulation in both use-cases. Easy!
John’s listed some great options for hardware.

You can also opt to go with a generic foot pedal (less expensive) that interfaces with your laptop/compute (most likely via USB, but there are other types of pedal workflows that’d jive), then map the pedal - most likely with a “down” or “press” event on the pedal mapped to a “right arrow” keypress. Plenty of free software out there that will do this and detect/map generic connected hardware events without requiring a hardware allow-list.

Excited to see John’s tool when it’s released!

Thanks for sharing this detailed explanation! I really like the idea of mapping a generic USB foot pedal to the left/right arrow keys. It's a practical and cost-effective solution that could work across multiple presentation platforms without relying on specialized hardware.

The fact that it can be customized with free key-mapping software makes it even more accessible for users with different workflows and accessibility needs.

I'm also looking forward to seeing John's tool when it's released—it sounds like it could provide an even more streamlined experience for presenters. Thanks again for contributing such a helpful suggestion!