Open and edit PPTX files without PowerPoint

What opens, and what does not

These come through from PowerPoint:

• Every slide in order, with its background color.
• Titles and text boxes, in the places the slide's layout gives them, with bullets, numbering, alignment, and each word's bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, color, size and font.
• Pictures in PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, WebP or SVG, and simple shapes: rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, triangles, arrows and lines, grouped ones included.
• The theme's colors and fonts, and the speaker notes.

These are named in a message as the deck opens and are not kept: tables, charts, SmartArt, embedded objects, video and sound, animations, transitions, pictures in the old EMF or WMF formats, and shapes other than the simple ones above (their text is kept). Slide numbers, dates and footers set up on PowerPoint's master slides are left out too. Text boxes keep their positions, so each slide keeps its layout.

16:9 slides, older decks and fonts

Presentations works in widescreen 16:9, the shape PowerPoint has used for new decks since 2013. A 4:3 deck opens centered on a 16:9 slide, with empty space at the sides, and saves that way. If it will be shown on an old 4:3 projector, keep a copy of the original. Old .ppt files from PowerPoint 2003 and earlier need to be saved as .pptx in PowerPoint first.

Fonts are kept by name. If a font from the deck is not installed on your PC, another stands in on screen, while the .pptx keeps the original name, so the slides look right again on a computer that has the font.

Pictures can be swapped by dropping a new one on the slide and deleting the old one. Seven layouts and seven themes are there for new slides, and the deck's own theme is offered alongside them.

Presenting

• F5 starts from the first slide, Shift F5 from the one you are on, full screen.
• Next slide: →, ↓, Space, Enter, Page Down or a click. Back: ←, ↑, Page Up or a right-click. Clickers that send Page Up and Page Down work as well.
• B blanks the screen to black, and pressing it again brings the slide back. Home and End jump to the first and last slide. Esc ends the show.

Speaker notes are saved with each slide in the .pptx, so they travel with the file, but they are not shown on a second screen while you present. If you speak from notes, keep them on paper or on another device.

Animations and transitions do not play, so each slide appears at once. For most talks that is a plus: the audience sees the point straight away.

Saving as PowerPoint or PDF

Ctrl S saves over the .pptx you opened. If the deck lost anything when it opened, Presentations first asks whether to Replace the original or Save as a new file; for a deck you only borrowed, a new file keeps the original whole.

Save as PDF… writes the slides as a PDF, one slide per 16:9 page, without the notes; you only choose a name and a folder. A PDF is the safe way to send a deck to someone who only needs to read it, and PDF to JPG turns its pages into pictures.

Other ways to open a .pptx on Windows: PowerPoint for the web opens decks in a browser with a Microsoft account after an upload to OneDrive, and LibreOffice Impress is part of an open-source desktop suite. Presentations keeps the file on your PC with no account.