Handling Microsoft PowerPoint file format

Handling Microsoft PowerPoint (file format)

This page discusses various available options for working with Microsoft PowerPoint [en.wikipedia.org] documents in your Qt application. Please also read the general considerations outlined on the Handling Document Formats page.

Note that this information is collaboratively collected by the community, with no promise of completeness or correctness. In particular, use your own research and judgment when evaluating third-party libraries or tools!

NOTE: This page is a stub. Please help expanding it.

One needs to distinguish between two different formats (this page deals with both of them):

	Legacy “PowerPoint Presentation” format	“Office Open XML Presentation” format
classification:	binary	XML-based
main filename extension:	.ppt	.pptx
main internet media type:	application/vnd.ms-powerpoint	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
native format of PowerPoint:	until PowerPoint 2003	since PowerPoint 2007

Reading / Writing

Using PowerPoint itself

If you are exclusively targeting the Windows platform and Microsoft PowerPoint will be installed on all target machines, then you can use Qt’s ActiveX framework [qt.io] to access PowerPoint’s .ppt and .pptx processing functionality through OLE automation. For an introductory code example (and a way to list the API provided by the PowerPoint COM object), consult this how to [qt.io] (focuses on Microsoft Excel, but it works the same way for PowerPoint).

	DLL file name	COM object name	platforms	license
Microsoft PowerPoint [office.microsoft.com]	?	PowerPoint.Application	Windows	commercial

Using independent parser/writer libraries

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	API	.ppt	.pptx	reading	writing	platforms	license
[http:// …]…	…	…	…	…	…	…	…

Using manual XML processing

Files using the XML-based (.pptx) format could be processed using Qt’s XML handling classes (see Handling Document Formats).

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Using batch conversion tools

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Rendering

Using PowerPoint itself

TODO: If you know whether PowerPoint’s COM object (see above) supports rendering individual pages from a .ppt/.pptx presentation to images (e.g. for thumbnails), please edit this section.

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Interactive Viewing

Using PowerPoint itself

TODO: If you know whether PowerPoint provides a “viewer” ActiveX control that can be embedded in a Qt application through ActiveQT, please fill out this section (include links to relevant resources!)

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Manual solution

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See Also

• Handling Document Formats
  • other Microsoft Office formats:
    • Microsoft Word
    • Microsoft Excel
  • other “Presentation” document formats:
    • OpenDocument Presentation

Categories:

• Developing_with_Qt