17. Migrating Files to PowerPoint 2007
In This Chapter
- Open Options
- Converting Objects
- Opening PowerPoint 2007 Files Using PowerPoint 97–2003 (Compatibility Pack)
- How Presentations Are Windowed
- PowerPoint Command-Line Parameters
- What’s a Command-Line Parameter?
- Starting in PowerPoint Safe Mode
- Inside the New PPTX File Format
Opening a presentation is probably one of the most basic operations in PowerPoint. Although it is easy to do, a few interesting topics related to this can improve your productivity, as you will see in this chapter.
Open Options
A subtle feature surrounding the Open command is the ability to open the file in a specific manner. In addition to opening files in the traditional manner, the other options are
- Open as Read Only—PowerPoint won’t let you save the file. This is useful if you want to present something, for instance, and ensure that you don’t accidentally make an edit.
- Open as Copy—Edit a copy of the presentation so that you still have the original.
- Open in Browser—A rare option only used for PowerPoint presentations saved in HTML format. It gives you the option to open it in the browser instead of in PowerPoint.
- Open and Repair—If opening a presentation in the traditional manner didn’t work, this tells PowerPoint to open the presentation however it can, even if it means throwing away corrupted portions of the presentation.
To access these open options, you can either use the shortcut key Ctrl+O to get to the Open File dialog or click the Office button and select the Open option. At this point, the default operation would be a simple Open, but to access these specific types of Open options, click the arrow next to the Open button (see Figure 17.1).
Figure 17.1 The Open command’s alternative options.
Converting Objects
As you know, there are many new content types in PowerPoint 2007, such as the renovated charts (see Chapter 6, “Rediscover Charts”) and the new SmartArt (see Chapter 5, “Diagrams and SmartArt”). These have replaced the charts and diagrams from PowerPoint 97–2003, which exist in millions of PowerPoint presentations that are “out in the wild.”
When opening a .ppt file that was created in PowerPoint 97–2003, any charts or diagrams that exist in the presentation are replaced with what we call compatible objects.
At first glance, it seems as though these objects are exactly the same as they were when created in previous versions of PowerPoint, but if you try to double-click one to edit it, you are prompted with whether you want to convert the object to its newer equivalent (see Figure 17.2).
Figure 17.2 When trying to edit a legacy diagram or chart, you are prompted to convert to the 2007 format first.
The prompts are different for diagrams and charts. For diagrams, to edit the diagram, you must convert it to a 2007 format, but you are given two options: Convert to SmartArt and Convert to Shapes. In most cases, you will want to convert it to the SmartArt to maintain its semantics as a diagram so that PowerPoint still treats it as a diagram.
For charts, you have two options: Converting or Edit Existing.
Note
There is a third option of Convert All, but it does the same thing as Convert; it just allows you to convert more than one object at a time.
If you choose Edit Existing, the OLE Chart Object User Interface is launched, and you can continue editing it in OLE mode (see Figure 17.3). Unlike editing a diagram, you aren’t forced to upgrade the chart to continue editing it.
Figure 17.3 Edit Existing on a legacy chart leaves it as an OLE object.
Note
This section discusses the complications involved when opening PowerPoint 97–2003 diagrams and charts with PowerPoint 2007. Nearly all other old PowerPoint content—including shapes, text, and pictures—simply converts automatically to the 2007 format, so there’s nothing noteworthy to mention.
Opening PowerPoint 2007 Files Using PowerPoint 97–2003 (Compatibility Pack)
This section is more helpful for those who have not upgraded to Office 2007. However, it’s also useful to understand this stuff so that you can help colleagues or friends who are still using older versions of Office. That way, they can open your shiny new .pptx files.
By default, if you try to open a .pptx in Office 2003, it will not know what that file is or even recognize that it is a PowerPoint file. However, if the latest service pack for Office 2003 is installed, the new .pptx file extensions will show up (see Figure 17.4). To install the latest updates, simply head to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com, and it should find the updates for Office 2003.
Figure 17.4 Whoa! PowerPoint 2007 files can be opened in PowerPoint 2003? After the compatibility pack for Office 2007 has been installed, new options for the 2007 formats appear in the PowerPoint 2003 Open or Save As dialog boxes.
We talk in more detail about the .pptx file extension and saving your PowerPoint 2007 presentation in the .pptx and old .ppt format in Chapter 18, “Publishing Your Presentation to Any Format.”
Note
After you download the latest Office 2003 service pack, you can try to open a .pptx file. You will be greeted with a friendly message about downloading a compatibility pack in order to open the file. This opens your default browser and sends you to a site where you can download the pack. After this is downloaded and installed, any new files created using Office 2007 can be opened in Office 2003 applications.
How Presentations Are Windowed
PowerPoint windows are confusing to many PowerPoint users, and users often request that Microsoft change this behavior. Let’s take a look at what actually happens when multiple files are open in PowerPoint. If you have multiple PowerPoint presentations open at the same time, the taskbar displays a different button for each presentation. It’s as if each one is a separate open instance of PowerPoint (see Figure 17.5).
Figure 17.5 Each open presentation creates a taskbar button.
When you click a taskbar button for one of the open presentations, it appears in the main PowerPoint window. If you click a different presentation’s taskbar button, it opens into the same window, replacing the one you opened previously.
This behavior is due to how PowerPoint is structured. It is currently a Multiple Document Interface (MDI) application in which one main window exists and many sub-windows can be created. MDI applications were very popular in the earlier days of Microsoft Windows, when PowerPoint was first created.
To see an example where sub-windows are created, do the following:
1. Select the View tab.
2. Under the Window group, select New Window, Arrange All, or Cascade.
3. Notice sub-windows within the main window, which can be manipulated and resized.
In this example, you can have multiple views of the same presentation if the New Window option is selected. Compare this behavior to Word, which is a Single Document Interface (SDI) application in which each document open is in its own Window.
Note
A shortcut to Cascade view is Ctrl+F5.
The main reason we point this out is to help you understand why you cannot display and edit two separate presentations side by side in separate windows or on separate monitors.
Tip
Technically, you can edit two presentations on two different monitors by manually stretching the main PowerPoint window across your two monitors and then resizing the presentation windows so that there’s one on each monitor; but it’s a little painful to set up, and it’s incredibly ugly.
If you have multiple sub-windows, you can cycle through them by pressing Ctrl+F6. Neat, huh?
PowerPoint Command-Line Parameters
In this section, we discuss launching PowerPoint from the command line, which is useful if you’re comfortable using the Windows command line.
What’s a Command-Line Parameter?
When a Windows computer program is run from the Start menu or by double-clicking an icon, it runs a program sitting on your hard disk. For example, click the Start button and choose All Programs; then choose Accessories. Right-click the Calculator icon and choose Properties. You will see that the shortcut in the All Programs menu runs PowerPoint by invoking the application’s executable file from %SystemRoot%system32calc.exe. Although Calculator doesn’t support them, some programs let you add additional text after the program name to run the program in a special mode.
Command-Line Parameters in PowerPoint
Now let’s talk specifically about PowerPoint. PowerPoint supports a handful of command-line parameters. Use these to create special Windows shortcuts (right-click the desktop and choose New, Shortcut) or to perform PowerPoint tasks quickly from the command prompt or a batch file.
Tip
Learn more about writing batch files at this website: www.computerhope.com/batch.htm.
You will need to modify the commands based on where you installed PowerPoint. Following are three basic examples of adding parameters to the PowerPoint startup file to cause it to perform a specific operation:
- Open a Presentation
"x:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12powerpnt.exe" "x: folderfilename.pptx"
- Print a Presentation
"x:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12powerpnt.exe" /p "x:
folderfilename.pptx" - Start a Presentation in Slideshow
"x:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12powerpnt.exe" /s
"x:folderfilename.pptx"
Note that you need to include the full path for the filename, as well as for the PowerPoint executable file. Also, these only work if PowerPoint is not already running.
PowerPoint Parameter Example
Do the following to test this alternative method for printing a PowerPoint presentation.
1. Create a presentation and save it as c:spiffy.pptx.
2. Right-click the Desktop and choose New Shortcut. In the location box, type, as shown in Figure 17.6:
"c:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12powerpnt.exe" /p "x:spiffy.pptx"
Figure 17.6 Create a shortcut to directly perform a PowerPoint operation, like printing a file in this example.
3. Click Next.
4. Give the shortcut a name, such as Print Spiffy.
5. Notice that there’s now a new shortcut on your desktop. If you double-click it, it will print spiffy.pptx.
Tip
You can also print a presentation from Windows by right-clicking the presentation and choosing Print from the context menu, which is much less work. But, this illustrates the command-line concept that you can use at the command line and in batch files to save time. Creating shortcuts is also handy if this is a task you do so often that it’s worth saving that extra click.
Starting in PowerPoint Safe Mode
Just as in Windows, PowerPoint has a safe mode that disables functionality and add-ins to make sure that PowerPoint can start without crashing.
If PowerPoint crashed the last time you tried to start it up, it will launch into safe mode the next time you start it up. It’s doing its best to make sure that your second attempt to launch PowerPoint doesn’t crash.
If you want to enter safe mode yourself, simply hold down the Ctrl key while launching PowerPoint, and the dialog shown in Figure 17.7 appears. The dialog will say that it noticed you have the Ctrl key held down and will ask if you really want to start PowerPoint in safe mode.
Figure 17.7 Hold down Ctrl while launching PowerPoint until this dialog appears.
Inside the New PPTX File Format
Office 2007 introduces a new file format dubbed the Microsoft Office Open XML. For the nerds out there, it’s essentially a zip file containing XML files, and the binary resources, such as images, videos, and VBA macros.
XML
Never heard of XML? XML is designed to be human readable and is essentially just a text file, along with tags around pieces of the text that tell you what the text is talking about. Here’s a short XML document example that we made up:
<instructions>
<step number=1 >Put on pants.</step>
<step number=2 >Put on shoes.</step>
</instructions>
Here’s some sample XML from inside a PowerPoint file. It takes some expertise to know what each item means, but it’s perfectly readable (and editable) text.
<Properties ...>
<TotalTime>0</TotalTime>
<Words>0</Words>
<Application>Microsoft Office PowerPoint</Application>
<PresentationFormat>On-screen Show (4:3)</PresentationFormat>
<Paragraphs>0</Paragraphs>
<Slides>1</Slides>
Why a New File Format?
So why a new file format? Microsoft touts these advantages of the new format compared to the binary formats from Office 2003 and before:
- Smaller size—Zip files use industry standard compression techniques to compress files down to the smallest possible size, which is better than something custom Microsoft might come up with on its own.
- Safer—Macros are stored in a separate part of the file, so system administrators can strip out the dangerous parts more easily. Plus files are macro free by default, as described in the previous section. Storing components as different parts of the same zip file also means that if one part of the file is damaged, most of the rest of the presentation is still recoverable. So, the entire presentation is less likely to get corrupted.
- Transparency—Microsoft has had public relations nightmares in the past when people discovered that Word documents often hid the names of authors inside Word files. People would send these files to others, not realizing what data was inside. Zip files and XML are open standards, so anyone can peer inside a file to make sure that nothing is hidden inside.
- Easier to manipulate—Using Zip and XML standards means that developers can create handy tools for manipulating Office files. They’re no longer hindered by needing Office macros to change stuff inside a file. Even if you’re not a developer, this means that more tools will eventually be available for you to do neat stuff to your files.
Peering Inside a PPTX File
Let’s look within the raw insides of a file. You will need to save a .pptx file:
1. Create a new presentation in PowerPoint.
2. Click the Office button and choose Save (or just press Ctrl+S). In the Save As dialog, check that the Save As Type drop-down is set to PowerPoint Presentation. Click Save.
Note
This section is slightly more advanced than most of the rest of this book. We assume that you’re familiar with changing filename extensions in Windows and with opening Zip files. It’s hard for us to walk you through these step-by-step because the steps can be very different, depending on how your computer is set up. If these concepts sound foreign to you, skip to the next section or find your favorite geek to help you out.
Open It Up
We need to have Windows stop hiding file extensions so that we can change the extension later. In Windows XP, go to My Computer or Windows Explorer, find the Tools menu, and choose Folder Options. In Windows Vista, click Start, Control Panel, Appearance and Personalization, and then Folder Options. For both Windows XP and Windows Vista, after you have the Folder Options dialog open, go to the View tab and make sure that Hide Extensions for Known File Types is not checked. Then click OK.
Now let’s break open that file.
1. Using My Computer or Windows Explorer, locate the file you saved.
2. Right-click the file and choose Rename. Change the file’s extension from .pptx to .zip. Confirm that you want to change the extension when Windows asks you. You should notice the icon change from your friendly PowerPoint presentation icon to a Zip folder icon.
3. Now right-click the presentation’s icon and choose Explore to open the presentation as a Zip file. This should show you the contents of the file.
Note
We’re using the Windows built-in Zip file viewer here, but feel free to use any Zip program you’re comfortable with, such as WinZip.
You will see some folders such as _rels, docProps, and ppt. (see Figure 17.8).
Figure 17.8 View the contents of a PowerPoint presentation, as a Zip file, in Windows XP.
Terminology (Parts and Containers)
Inside the folder are a bunch of files, such as slideLayout1.xml. Because these are parts of the presentation, Microsoft calls these files inside the file “parts.” Most of these are standard XML files that you can edit using your favorite text editor, such as Notepad.
Tip
Even though XML is editable by any text editor, the files are designed to be mostly read by computers and not humans, so everything is crammed onto one line. You’re best off using a text editor that can “pretty print” text, such as Microsoft Visual Studio. You can download Visual Studio Express free at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/default.aspx. Internet Explorer will also format XML nicely as well if you only want to read XML.
The entire Zip file is called a container because it contains the parts. A container is just a fancy way of saying Zip file.
Container Inventory
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s inside a typical presentation container. We will describe roughly the parts inside each folder:
- docProps—These properties apply to the document—stuff you want to know without opening the presentation, such as the number of slides in there and who authored the presentation. You will find PowerPoint-specific information inside app.xml and application-agnostic information inside core.xml. You will also find an image thumbnail.jpeg that Windows uses to show the little preview of your presentation in Save dialogs and into the Windows Explorer.
- ppt—Here PowerPoint stores very PowerPoint-specific information. Presentation.xml stores the core stuff, and some auxiliary data is split out into presProps.xml and viewProps.xml. For example,
- presentation.xml stores the following:
- Ordered lists of Custom Shows (see Chapter 15, “Going Beyond Slide-by-Slide”)
- Slides
- Masters
- Slide sizes
- Presentation-wide text properties, such as the embedded font list (see Chapter 18)
- Save properties, such as how to compress pictures (see Chapter 4, “Working with Pictures”)
- Editor properties
- Content properties
- presProps.xml stores information such as what pen color to use when you annotate in Slide Show (see Chapter 16, “Running a Slide Show Like a Pro”)
- tableStyles.xml describes how your tables will look (see Chapter 8, “Tables Like You’ve Never Seen Before”).
- presentation.xml stores the following:
- pptslideLayouts stores all the slide layouts. Slide layouts are described in Chapter 10, “Formatting Your Presentation.” One slideLayout1.xml file exists for each layout.
- pptslideMasters stores slide masters, also described in Chapter 10. One slideMaster1.xml file exists for each master, though the default presentation only starts with one master.
- pptslides are the actual slides in your presentation; one slide1.xml file exists for each slide. Everything that lives on a slide is stored inside these files from shapes, placeholders, and text positioning and formatting to animation information.
- ppt heme stores a copy of the theme used by this presentation. Themes are described more in Chapter 11, “Dissecting Themes.”
Relationships of the Parts
You might have also noticed a bunch of directories named _rels scattered throughout the file. Inside, you will find files that describe the relationships that files have with other files inside the presentation.
As a simple example, let’s say that slide 1 uses layout 2. You will find slide 1 at pptslidesslide1.xml. Its list of relationships lives at pptslides\_relsslide1.xml.rels. The relationship file always has the same name as the file you’re looking at—only it’s inside the _rels subfolder and with an extra .rels appended at the end of its name. Inside slide1.xml.rels, you will see something like this:
The core piece here is the reference to "../slideLayouts/slideLayout1.xml". The ".." describes a relative path, which means that you go up a directory into the ppt directory. So, this means that you will find the layout at pptslideLayoutsslideLayout1.xml. The file also notes that this relationship is called "rId1".
Neat huh? All this means is that the part pptslidesslide1.xml has a relationship called "rId1" to another part pptslideLayoutsslideLayout1.xml. If you look inside slide1.xml, it probably references rId1 and has more details about the relationship.
Edit Away
Feel free to experiment by editing any of the files inside the Zip file, saving your edits back into the Zip file, renaming the file back to a .pptx extension, and reopening the file with PowerPoint. The language is fairly esoteric; however, PowerPoint is very picky about what you write, so it might warn you that the file is corrupt if you mistype anything in your edits.
Caution
Always work on a copy of presentation. It’s very easy to corrupt a presentation when editing it in this way, and a corruption is often not obvious immediately after it has occurred. For example, after accessing a specific element on a certain slide days later, you might notice that something is corrupted.
Also, be careful not to change the names of files inside the Zip file unless you know what you’re doing. Filenames can be referenced from multiple .rel files throughout the container.
Also, while the specifics differ for each application, you can use a similar technique to crack open Word 2007 and Excel 2007 files, such as .docx document and .xlsx spreadsheet files. The core concepts of containers, parts, and relationships apply to those files as well.
Further Resources
If you found the file format fascinating, you’re in luck. Microsoft published the Office 2007 file format as an open standard, so you can read the full Office 2007 file format specifications that were accepted by the ECMA standards body here: www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/. They’re very technically detailed, describing what all the jargon is inside each XML part inside a presentation container.
Brian Jones, a Microsoft Office program manager who worked on the file format, also has a blog that talks about the Office 2007 file formats here. Though he has yet to cover PowerPoint in great depth, he talks about the file format in great detail and includes tutorials on how to create a Word document or an Excel document from scratch: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/. In this post, Brian describes how to make a minor edit to the presentation part to reorder slides in your presentation: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/04/11/573529.aspx.