Convert PowerPoint slides to HTML

[JDS]

I have a set of MS PowerPoint slides. Around 50 slides, most with
embedded images.

I need to convert them to a website.

There is a bunch of complicating stuff in-bewteen, but my question is
broad, so some of the details are not critical. Has anyone else converted
a PPT presentation to a webpage? How did you do it?

My problems include the following:

* PPT's native "Save as Web Page..." tool sucks ass-nuggets. The
resulting slide show is only viewable in MSIE and the resulting slide show
is full of unnecessary markup and and general bandwidth waste. Using
"Save As Webpage..." is *not* an option!!

* The slides are all supposed to be the same format but they are not.

* This site will need to be maintained in a CMS by a non-techie. (I am
building the CMS).

* Getting images out of PPT files sucks ass-nuggets. The only real option
is "Save as Web Page..." and then taking the resulting image files in the
xxx_files subdirectory. However, resizing the *huge* images for use on
the web takes some (albeit only a small amount) technical skill that I'm
not confident the non-techie who will be maintaining this thing has.

* Other issues...

Right now I'm just brainstorming so any ideas would be great. Thank you
thank you!

 

[Toby Inkster]

I have a set of MS PowerPoint slides. Around 50 slides, most with
embedded images.
I need to convert them to a website.

Tried OpenOffice.org?

It can convert Powerpoint presentations into HTML and/or Flash.

 

[mscir]

I have a set of MS PowerPoint slides. Around 50 slides, most with
embedded images. I need to convert them to a website.<snip>
* Getting images out of PPT files sucks ass-nuggets. The only real option
is "Save as Web Page..." and then taking the resulting image files in the
xxx_files subdirectory. However, resizing the *huge* images for use on
the web takes some (albeit only a small amount) technical skill that I'm
not confident the non-techie who will be maintaining this thing has.

Screen capture each slide, paste into Photoshop, crop the part of the
image you want to keep, adjust it to your liking, File > Save For Web as
a compressed jpg? You could also make images of the back and forward
arrows, etc, and use them in your html pages if you wanted to recreate
the PPT look.

Mike

 

[Mitja]

I have a set of MS PowerPoint slides. Around 50 slides, most with
embedded images.
I need to convert them to a website.

Hmmmm..... how often will the slides change? How advanced does the CMS
need to be?
HTML is not exactly a great language for creating presentations - at least
not ones with all kinds of fancy graphics and charts. If a non-techie, and
one that possibly isn't even able to resize images, has to maintain it,
I'd say it's a no go.
The other options I see are:
1) screen captures. You could make a great tool for that - maybe get an
open source image grabbing software, then modify the code so that when
your CMS user presses say F7, the screen gets captured PLUS your proggie
detects where the slide is and crops it. But there's still the problem of
placing the image into the CMS, i.e. determining which slide of which file
was captured. Maybe some fancy API calls?
2) why force html at all? Give the visitors a link to ppt & the free ppt
viewer, or, better still, convert it to pdf. That's extremely easy to do
if you have Adobe Acrobat installed.

Mitja

 

[JDS]

Tried OpenOffice.org?

It can convert Powerpoint presentations into HTML and/or Flash.

Thanks. I did, and actually, Org converts PPT into Jpeg images, too.
And with more flexibility than PowerPoint. (At least, PPT 2000, the
version I am using). You can actually select what size image output you
want.

Thing is, I am not crazy about the convert-to-image idea. It goes against
the grain of my philosophy that Web pages ought to be text, not pictures
of text.

Did I mention that the web pages do not have to look *exactly* the same as
the PPT slides? Just the same content.

So how to get all that stuff out of PPT in an easy fashion?

 

[Tina - AffordableHOST, Inc.]

Tried OpenOffice.org?

It can convert Powerpoint presentations into HTML and/or Flash.

Have you actually been able to get that to work? I tried once, awhile ago,
and it wasn't pretty.

About the only thing I've been able to nicely export with openoffice, is rtf
to pdf.

--Tina

 

[Andy Dingley]

I have a set of MS PowerPoint slides. Around 50 slides, most with
embedded images.

I need to convert them to a website.

This is quite easy as a piece of VBA / ActiveX coding. You use the
Powerpoint object model to read the content from code, rather than
fooling with file formats.

There must be a million such tools to do this already. The one I use
is from the W3C, but I don't know if it's public or internal use.

 

[Travis Newbury]

I have a set of MS PowerPoint slides. Around 50 slides, most with
embedded images.

I need to convert them to a website.

These guys do that. www.mpaqtech.com

 

[JDS]

These guys do that. www.mpaqtech.com

Yes, they do -- I took a look at their website. But their solution is not
quite acceptable to me. Problems include: They require Windows Media
player browser plugin and everything else is done in Flash.

Personally, I hate Flash more and more every day, at least as a way of
producing an information-oriented website.

But thanks for the suggestion!

 

[JDS]

This is quite easy as a piece of VBA / ActiveX coding. You use the
Powerpoint object model to read the content from code, rather than
fooling with file formats.

Could you be more specific? Lead me to examples and whatnot?

All the references I can find about PPT -> HTML on W3.org are *old* -- as
in 8+ years old.

 

[John Brandt]

I have a set of MS PowerPoint slides. Around 50 slides, most with
embedded images.

I need to convert them to a website.

Might want to try this plug-in for MS-Office.

http://www.rehab.uiuc.edu/office/

It will create HTML pages for PPT and make them accessible.

jeb

 

[Andy Dingley]

All the references I can find about PPT -> HTML on W3.org are *old* -- as
in 8+ years old.

That's probably the one ! I know I got it in '99. But as the core
HTML standards are 8 years old and PowerPoint (barring some
fripperies) has been the same for about the same time, then it keeps
going.