Package For CD in PPT 2007

[Idontwantspam]

As with PPT 2003, PPT 2007 has a useful tool to make a presentation CD with your show and any other ones you want to add. The CD includes the PowerPoint viewer on it, and will play the presentation automatically from any computer with Windows 2000 or later, even if PPT isn't installed. This is very handy when trying to give a presentation made in PPT 2007 on ancient school or work computers that ony have PPT 2000 or something. The problem is that PPT 2007 tries - in fact, forces you to - convert your *.pptx (PPT 2007 format) files to *.ppt (PPT 2003 format). Obviously, this is not something you want to do. The viewer itself, despite what the Presentation CD maker leads you to believe, can play all PowerPoint files starting with PPT 97 or 2000 (I don't recall which) up through PPT 2007 files, including *.pptx files. When you go to make the CD, you are led to believe that this isn't possible, but the viewer itself allows you to choose pptx files and appears to play them just fine. So, here's the quick little hack I devised. I always like to save my presentation CDs to the hard disk before burning them, just to test them. The solution is to choose "Copy to Folder" from the CD dialog. Allow it to convert your files to *.ppt. Then, go to where you saved the files and replace any *.ppt files with the original *.pptx files. The final step to make it work properly is to open playlist.txt and replace all of the file names with the correct ones. I just press Ctrl+H and tell it to replace all instances of .ppt with .pptx. So far, it seems to have worked!

So does anyone know why the developers made it so that you are supposed to use PPT rather than PPTX?

I hope folks find this useful!