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I've created a presentation as a series of .png images, one per slide. What is a good way to convert these into a .ppt (PowerPoint) that I can give to some audio-visual person? I'm entirely on Linux, with no Windows or Mac software available.

(Or maybe PowerPoint isn't the only game in town for presentation file formats?)

6 Answers 6

6

I'd output to PDF, which is commonly used for presentations. To convert use the convert program (from Image Magick).

convert *.png presentation.pdf

If you don't have convert yet, install the imagemagick package

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

(It looks like you can also use convert directly to a .ppt file, but for me this doesn't work as well.)

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  • Looks good and easy. Will try that. I wonder if ImageMagick can go the opposite way - make .png or .jpg from a given .pdf?
    – DarenW
    Apr 20, 2010 at 23:40
  • 1
    I use pdfimages for that. It extracts all the embedded images from a pdf (part of xpdf-utils package).
    – Geoff
    Apr 21, 2010 at 13:32
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You can use OpenOffice.org Impress to import each of these PNGs into single slide, apply the desired transitions and export to a .ppt file.

OpenOffice.org comes with most Linux distros

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  • Well, that seems obvious! Will try that. I did try OO a while ago, but thinking only of using Impress to create the content. I found it lacking in graphics capability.
    – DarenW
    Apr 20, 2010 at 2:42
  • This has the disadvantage of having to manually deal with each image. Is there a way to handle say 50 images at once?
    – DarenW
    Apr 20, 2010 at 23:36
  • I'm not sure. Have a look at @Dennis' answer superuser.com/questions/132767/…
    – Sathyajith Bhat
    Apr 21, 2010 at 14:02
  • I would recommend that people use LibreOffice nowadays instead of OpenOffice. LibreOffice is the maintained fork of OpenOffice.
    – Flimm
    Feb 9 at 21:15
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Rather than try to directly convert the PNG files to a PDF or other format presentation, create a new presentation in Inkscape with the PNGs imported. Inkscape with Inkscape Slides turns out to be a great way to make presentations, and a good way to deal with old presentations that exist only as PNGs. (See question Converting Inkscape layers directly to a slideshow presentation?)

However, the other answer recommending ImageMagick convert is useful too.

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You can create a Markdown file with all the slides, and then use Pandoc to convert it to a PowerPoint file. Here's example Markdown:

![](image1.png)

---

![](image2.png)

---

![](image3.png)

And here's the command to convert it to a PowerPoint file:

pandoc slides.md -o slides.pptx
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Good news! There's a way to do this using LibreOffice Impress!

Open a new slideshow with LibreOffice Impress, then click Insert, Media, Photo Album. This dialog will appear:

Dialog

Click "Add" to add the photos you want to add, and then click "Insert Slides" when you are doing. LibreOffice will create a slide for each image. Save it as "filename.pptx" (PowerPoint's format) when you are done, if you need a PowerPoint file.

I recommend LibreOffice over OpenOffice by the way, as the former is much better maintained than the latter.

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I don't remember if this is the exact solution I used, but I have run some kind of add-on to OpenOffice that just took a whole directory full of images and created individual slides from them. It was absolute magic. Give this a try, I hope it's the one I'm thinking of http://ooomacros.org/user.php#95976

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  • The link is broken
    – Flimm
    Jan 15 at 16:37

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