Incorrect conversion of PPT97 animations

[gdd]

Hi,

We have lots of Powerpoint97 documents with several animations. Unfortunately by opening in Impress (and automatic conversion of coarse) these animations - including foreground and background settings - are complete out of order.

Did some checking and asking around. Then a big surprise to me: By opening first in Powerpoint2003 and save without any change, the file size is grown with some bytes. And now the biggest surprise: Impress convert this bigger file perfect.

So there is a difference in real “97 format” and the “97, 2000, 2003 format”.

Questions:
Does someone have a solution to open real 97 format in Impress without corrupting animations?
Or made a batch method to scan large disks to open PPT97 and save in PPT2003 format?

Thank in advance for your reaction

[TerryE]

Looks like you need a small variation to another post that I've just done: Using COM to integrate Powerpoint and Impress. What version of MSO are you running on your PC?

The other thing that you could try is to see is the Sun ODF add-in for MSO processes these files once opened.

[gdd]

Thanks TerryE,

Quit impressive. The possibility to call COM based applications from OOoBasic was new to me.

But, (there always is a but) in our situation there is a need to open and save in Powerpoint2003 before OOo is started. Otherwise the animations are disturbed already by conversion to Impress before this code can be activated.

Our goal was (and is) to get rid of MS-Office. So although we have lots of MSO97 and less MSO2003 licences. An Add-in for MSO is no option (for doing what?), I am looking for a perfect conversion to Impress including animations.

If this in not possible then:
- I have to write VBA-code in PPT2003
- Need to scan some Terrabytes for PPT-documents.
- Restore archived data to scan
- We always shall be surprised by end-users who stored there PPT's at “forbidden” places and blame OOo for wrong conversions

[TerryE]

I've attached a quick cut of the Calc macro that you need to do the batch conversion — and this is perhaps the nub of our disconnect. My mindset was that you were exactly going to do was to "to scan some Terrabytes for PPT-documents" and do a batch conversion. This utility does just that. Your statement that you "need to open and save in Powerpoint2003 before OOo is started" is not quite correct. You need to do this open/save before loading the document into OOo. Whether the Soffice.bin image is running is immaterial.

In essence this is a batch migration. It walks a directory hierarchy and for each PPT XXX.ppt it finds in path YYY:

• Powerpoint: open YYY\XXX.ppt and SaveAs TMP$YYY\XXX.ppt (in current PPT format)
• Impress: open TMP$YYY\XXX.ppt and SaveAs TMP$YYY\XXX.odp
• Delete TMP$YYY\XXX.ppt

This assumes that you have some form of migration team doing this as part of you OOo rollout. These PCs would need MSO 2003 and OOo installed.

I agree that this isn't as good a use-case as simply fixing the PPT importer, but this last case requires a fix to OOo, and these can take months to years to appear. Looking at the QA Issues there are about 30-40 QA Issues — Presentations: Animation Powerpoint some of which relate to your problem.

Yes, some of these are pure bugs in OOo code, but you must also remember that MS doesn't want 3rd parties to be able to open and manipulate its file formats. The object here is to lock users and enterprises into the MSO product set. The MSO file formats are closed. No published specs exist. The OOo team needs to retrengineer the file formats and Word / Excel / PPT functionality and this is complex and time consuming. So imports are not exact. Even the new "open" OOXML is in many ways a sham as it has many tags with definition "implement feature X in package Y version Z" without defining how to do this.

As an enterprise you have two broad choices: (i) accept that you are locked into MSO and pay the commercial per annum per user price for what is still the industry leading Office Automation product; (ii) invest in moving your data and process into an Open format and packages, which have a minimal future run rate cost.

[gdd]

Thanks again TerryE

I gonna have a closer look to your "PPTconvertorB V1.ods", my first impression is that this is what I need.

[gdd]

Dear TerryE,

I believe you've sent me an incomplete "PPTconvertorB V1.ods", because sub ProcessDirectoryElement crashes on several missing Dim-statements
sFile, sPath, TMP$ perhaps more. TMP$ has to set to a proper name and there is no code to create and delete this temporary subdirectory?

I've made a start to add Dim's but I am not familiar enough with OOo-basic to do everything myself yet
Would you be so kind to send me a complete "PPTconvertorB V1.ods".

Thank you in advance

[TerryE]

Sorry, I just quickly hacked this together from the earlier quoted example. I assumed you might want to take it apart and debug it. There were just a few name changes and typos. Here's the new version