Exporting PowerPoint Presentations For The Web In Formats That Don’t Suck

It’s fairly rare that I find myself doing anything but “back-end” development, but at the moment I’m pitching in and helping tie-up a few loose ends on a new product which is a nice change. One task which I took over was exporting a tutorial from a MS PowerPoint presentation to something that would work on the web.. be it HTML, PDF, Flash, etc.

Microsoft Powerpoint 2003 offers an HTML export option, but big surprise, the version that looks decent only works in IE 5+ or something to that effect. When trying to load it in Firefox, you just get a blank screen. If you use the option to export it in a “compatible” mode which works in v3 browers on up, it looks like total crap. There are not really any options to use when exporting it either. After looking at the HTML it generates, you’ll feel a little dirty– sort of like if you had to write a full website using FrontPage.

I was getting at my wits end and ready to just give-up and suggest we just post the 1.5 MB PDF for the tutorial. I started googling for “PowerPoint To Flash conversion” whilst griping about it in our local, private IRC server at work when a c0-worker suggested exporting it from OpenOffice. I had an older version installed, but went ahead and upgraded to the 1.9 beta version.

The install went smoothly, and also asked if I wanted to move my data over from the old version which surprised me. Once I got it installed, I was able to export the presentation to HTML that didn’t suck with a lot of options, Macromedia Flash, as well as PDF (though I already have Adobe Acrobat/Distiller installed). Good stuff!

If you’re wrestling around with something similar, I highly suggest exporting it out of OpenOffice.