Tech Tuesday: converting PowerPoint slides

Today's Tech Tuesday feature question is more applications-related. Here at the Digital blog, our contributors largely blog about web technologies and mobile computing. Once in a while, we'll mention other computer technologies, like software and even hardware. This question is about converting PowerPoint slides:

We recently upgraded from Microsoft Office 2002 to Microsoft Office 2007. We run PowerPoint in our worship services and our worship director has an archive of PowerPoint presentations for all the worship songs. These were created in PowerPoint 2002. All the slides have text formatted in one font with a specific size and colour. When these are copied and pasted into PowerPoint 2007 the text box jumps to the upper left of the slide and the font size and colour change. The slide background does change to the one in the new presentation though. We have to select the text box and resize and colour the font for each slide. Using the paste option to keep the source formatting just keeps the background for the source slide but doesn’t keep the text box formatting.

This created a lot of extra work in reformatting and we would love to hear from anyone who might have a solution for this.

What have you tried? What has worked for you?

(photo credit)

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-- DJ Chuang, Director of Digital Initiatives & more, Leadership Network

Comments

[Michael Schutz]

Tongue-in-cheek solution (though not really)...move to MediaShout or another worship presentation software. If you're going to need to do a lot of manual conversion work anyway, why not make the jump to full-featured worship-specific software?

If you're really wanting to stay with Powerpoint, is it not possible to simply open the 2002 file in 2007? That should keep all the formatting intact. Then save it in the new format as a template, open all the rest of the files (I'm assuming each song is its own file?) and apply that template.

But really, do consider moving to worship presentation software - the initial setup is a bit of work, but once you have done that, it's so much easier!

Hope that helps,
Michael.

[Jack]

Michael makes a good point.

If the formatting is that crucial, and there is still a copy of Power Point 2002 available, you should be able to export the slides as JPEG.

Microsoft makes a Power Point viewer which allows the slides to be displayed but not edited. I was able to find it using Google.