2005-04-20

Extracting images from PowerPoint (.ppt) files

Earlier this week, I wanted to extract some artwork from PowerPoint files in order to reuse them in an HTML/CSS-based presentation (inspired by Sam Ruby's slides). OpenOffice 1.1.1 doesn't seem to provide any direct way to extract images used in a presentation (I have no idea whether PowerPoint has this feature).

After various approaches failed (either failing completely, or by yielding images of lower quality than those in the .ppt presentation), I managed to extract the images. Here's how:

  1. Open the .ppt file in OpenOffice.
  2. Do "Export as PDF".
  3. Use the pdfimages tool from xpdf to get the images as .ppm files.
  4. Use the pnmto* tools from the NetPBM collection to convert them into web-friendly formats.

27 January 2006 06:59

Comment from Bala

Hi Dave
I would suggest you do a file save as option and select the"html" format. This will saye your file.ppt as file.html and it will also save all the embedded images into a new folder. You can just browse and pick the images that you want. Another tool I would suggest is picasa from google. This is also a free ware and a good one to keep track of images and browse them very much more easier than even the windows browsers.

Regards
Bala

27 January 2006 07:18

Comment from David

Thanks for the suggestion. I think I tried the save as HTML route, and found that it scaled the images before saving them, leading to visible artifacts. But it is long enough ago that I don't remember the details, and
Open Office 2 might have changed the behaviour since then. Next time I need to do this, I'll try that route again to see if I have better luck with it.

27 January 2006 07:20

Comment from David

Oh, and Picasa is unfortunately Windows only, which rules it out as an option for me.

© 2003-2020 David Wragg. Some rights reserved.