My googling skills must be rusty, because I cannot find this information out. I am wondering if it is possible to open a powerpoint.mac presentation with open office. I only ask this because a TA in one of my classes couldn’t hook his ibook up to the projector due to a lack of equipment. When he copied his presentation over to the teachers windows platform, his windows powerpoint wouldn’t open it.
I was going to suggest he download OpenOffice, but wasn’t sure if powerpoint.mac files were compatible.
If they are not, for future reference (I.e, going to send him an email with the information for next class period), I was wondering if there was a freeware program out there that converts powerpoint.mac into regular powerpoint.
I don’t use PP, but I’m astonished that any MS Office product doesn’t open in its cross-platform equivalent — the exceptions being platform-specific file features like an AppleScript routine not being able to work in Windows or an OLE object from another application not functioning under MacOS.
We have a PowerPoint maven on the boards… paging Dooku!
I just checked my OpenOffice Impress program and clicked on the Save As option after creating a file. The options for PowerPoint are:
[ul][li]Microsoft PowerPoint 97/2000/XP (.ppt)[/li][li]Microsoft PowerPoint 97/2000/XP Templage (.pot)[/ul][/li]
If the PowerPoint Mac is a different extension, then my guess is that OO won’t open it.
Yes it is. Assuming the OS X on the iBook has the X11 Windows framework installed.
I’ll need version information about that, but there’s no reason why WinPPT couldn’t open a MacPPT file directly, unless[ul]
[li]The saved MacPPT file is version 4.0 or earlier,[/li]or
[li]The WinPPT version on the teacher’s machine is version 95 or earlier.[/ul][/li]
Regular PowerPoint? Harumph.
No, there is no freeware that will convert them, since they work cross-platform without having to convert them.
As an aside, we recently announced that we’re going to make a converter that will translate the new Office Open XML Formats to ODF. And we’re going to make them licensed open source. Rather progressive of us, no?
Ah, sorry, didn’t mean any disrespect by the “regular” comment. I am not hardcore windows and don’t hate mac or linux by any means.
Thanks for the info. I wrote the TA in question and told him about OpenOffice. I dunno if his version was 4.0 or lower, but I am certain the Professor had WinXP and 2003 Office.
