I had a PowerPoint 2007 presentation this morning that I needed to convert into the OpenDocument Presentation format, to make it usable in OpenOffice 3.0. It was a fairly simple presentation, with no animations or anything, just text and some figures.

My first attempt was to simply use the PPTX importer in Impress, and ended up with mixed results. While the presentation was readable, it had a bunch of things that were not quite right:

  • Bullets were missing (or used the wrong kind)
  • Images in the master slide background had borders around them
  • Titles were the wrong color

Being lazy, I looked around for another option, and remembered that Office 2007 SP1 included some functionality to export documents in OpenDocument format. I decided to give it a try and went into PowerPoint 2007, and executed the Save As –> OpenDocument Presentation command.

I was pleasantly surprised by the results, which were pretty much perfect, except for a couple minor differences due to font size. Definitely much better than I expected, and better than OpenOffice itself did. Not bad!


Tomas Restrepo

Software developer located in Colombia.