Opening PPS and PPTX files

Opening PPS and PPTX files

There are multiple ways how you can view PPS file.

• Get Microsoft Office software from Microsoft.com
• Download OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org
• Microsoft also has a free PPS viewer which you can also download from Microsoft.com website.

You can also open PPTX file using any ZIP decompression utility. Just rename PPTX file to ZIP and double click on it. The problem with this method is that you have to understand internals of Office Open XML format which is quite complex.

Opening this file in notepad or any other text editor is completely used since it is compressed and you won't see any meaningful information.

PPTX files internal structure

If you decide to look into details of PPTX file using ZIP here are some details which may help you.

In root folder you will see [Content_Types].XML file which contains type of the document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and associations with components used to read it.

The document itself is stored in ppt subfolder. If you go into this subfolder you will see multiple XML files defining slides, layouts, diagrams and media sources.

Basic document properties are stored in docProps folder and relations to other documents you can find in _rels folder.

Complete specification of Office Open XML format is available at http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm.

Get more information about File Extension .

If you are not able to open file with certain file extension make sure to check if extension for the file is correct. It is possible that information in the file doesn't match file extension.