Powerpoint Tip

Everyone knows PowerPoint, it is the ubiquitous tool from Microsoft that allows you to give presentations. Walk in any airport lounge and you will see salesmen and consultants tweaking their PowerPoint presentations to their potential customers.

Contact any vendor and tell him you are interested in their products and they will email you their latest PowerPoint presentation promoting their best and latest features.

A PowerPoint file is saved with a PPT extension which allows you to load it and edit it if needed. Sometimes, PowerPoint presentations are saved in PPS which does not allow you to open the file, it will just display the presentation to you thus protecting the contents from being copied or changed.

On my home laptop, I do not have Microsoft office installed, instead I have the freeware OpenOffice. I recently opend a pss presentation and using the OpenOffice equivalent to PowerPoint called impress and to my pleasant surprise I could edit the presentation.

So next time you get a PowerPoint PPS saved file and you would like to steal borrow a slide or graphics, open it with OpenOffice and take all you like.