I've made the change from Powerpoint to Beamer for most of my stuff. There is just one last detail that I need to address.
When I use Adobe Acrobat Reader in Full Screen mode as a presentation tool, the only cursor style I have access to is a silly white hand with a down arrow in the middle of it. It's not noticeable enough. I'd like to replace it with something much more noticeable, like the laser pointer option in Powerpoint.
If tried to figure out how to do this in the Windows 10 cursor options — but I don't even see the hand with the arrow that Acrobat Reader uses in the list that comes up, which makes it very hard to replace.
I'm also quite willing to use any (free) pdf reader that would provide me with the right option, but Foxit and Sumatra don't seem to do any better.
If I could find a straightforward artifact-free way to bring the pdf's into powerpoint, that would work too, but I haven't found one. If I have to do this slide-by-slide instead of file-by-file, that's not an amenable solution.
Best Answer
I found a solution by combing your suggestion of using another pdf viewer - the Sumatra or PDF-XChange Editor - and changing the system mouse pointer as described here https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/16761/presentation-software-with-a-cursor-looking-like-a-laser-pointer-instead-of-mous
"Go to the Mouse properties control panel, in the Devices and Pointers control panel section, click on the Pointers tab. Under the Customise scroll box there is a Browse... button. Clicking this allows you to select a .cur file to change the cursor's appearance. However, the built-in cursor files do not provide a laser-like cursor. This is where you have to create your own."