Open .ppt Slideshows With Free Viewer*

I was reminded of this “quick tip” topic article today, when I got a call for help and I was told that the caller “suddenly couldn’t open pictures in an e-mail they had received”. As I suspected, the “pictures” were not your usual picture files, but a .ppt file — a PowerPoint Presentation (aka “slideshow”).

Normally, opening attachments is no problem: you click on the “view” hyperlink; are asked if you want to “Open” or “Save” the file (since all I wanted to do was read it, I chose “open”). Here is where I was reminded that the machine did not have Office installed — instead open a picture, they saw “Windows cannot open this file:”

You may have seen a window like this in your computer user career…

(My article on what to do to resolve this can be read here.)

Fortunately, a quick visit to the Microsoft Download Center is all that’s required to enable my machine to view PowerPoint Presentations without purchasing and installing Microsoft Office.

Tip of the day/Today’s free link: If you are not using the Microsoft Office suite of programs, download and install the free PowerPoint Viewer 2007.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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How can I open a ".odt" ?

Q: Paul, How can I open a “.odt” ?

A: As I discussed in this article, Cannot open attachment…help!, when you run across a file that Windows does not recognize, and doesn’t know how to open, it is due to the fact that some program was used to create the file that you don’t have.

In this case that program was OpenWriter– the word processor in the free OpenOffice Suite.

Basically, when this happens, you have three options:
* Ask your sender to resend the file, only this time ‘Save As’ it to a more common file type. (such as .doc, or .rtf, or even .txt)
* Install the program on your machine yourself.
* Look for “viewer”, or “converter” tool.

I like the first choice myself (and I’m not always so polite in my phrasing), but most of you will probably prefer the third. (This comes up at least once a week for PowerPoint slideshows!)

A free document viewer for all common word processing formats can be found here.

A free file type converter (all types of ‘media’) can be found here.

.. and for the 600,000th time.. the PowerPoint Viewer is here.

[note: when you come across a ‘dot xyz‘ that you’ve never heard of before and have no idea what might of created it.. go to FILExt.com. There you will be able to look it up.]

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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View PowerPoint presentations without Office

I was reminded of this “quick tip” topic while I was doing research for an upcoming Tech–for Everyone article, and the information I wanted to read was contained in a PowerPoint slideshow (aka “presentation”) archive, available online.. a “.ppt” file.

Normally, this is no problem: you click on the “view” hyperlink; are asked if you want to “Open” or “Save” the file (since all I wanted to do was read it, I chose “open”). Here is where I was reminded that the machine I was surfing on was new and did not have Office installed — “Windows cannot open this file:”

You may have seen a window like this in your computer career…

(My article on what to do to resolve this can be read here.)

Fortunately, a quick visit to the Microsoft Download Center is all that’s required to enable my machine to view PowerPoint Presentations (and cool slides of airshows).

Tip of the day/Today’s free link: If you are not using the Microsoft Office suite of programs, download and install the free PowerPoint Viewer 2007.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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