Comments on: Importing a Powerpoint file into InDesign

By: Torben Jensen

Torben Jensen — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:58:54 +0000

What few people realize is that PowerPoint – like all other MS Office products – has a very extensive and powerful scripting language which allows you to automate tasks, recurse over files, slides and objects, and even do many things you can’t do through the menus.

Powerpoint macros are often overlooked and ignored, but can be very useful and real time savers.

The VBA macro language even allows for outside control from other applications – Perl as an example.

So it is absolutely possible that you can control PowerPoint directly from InDesign with a bit of clever scripting – or alternatively, control InDesign from VBA code.

Either way, I would explore the options if you have more than a simple one-timer to do.

By: Greg Mouning

Greg Mouning — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:17:02 +0000

This sounds like one of those Markszware products (http://www.markzware.com/products/) in the making (PPT2ID?)…

By: Roland

Roland — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:48:43 +0000

I tend to export to PDF and use my PDF editor to remove the background and then save as a new PDF. I then open the original PDF in the PDF editor again and remove everything but the background and again save as a new PDF.
This gives me the ability to scale the background so the slides have a bleed once placed into InDesign.

Also, when I have to use a Word or PowerPoint file in any other program, I tend to copy images into a blank document, scale them back to (as close to) their real size as possible and then export as a PDF to get the images from. This lets me re-place them on top of the placed PDFs and alter when necessary without having to deal with a PDF’s broken-up image pieces.

By: Frank Anthony

Frank Anthony — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:37:18 +0000

Hey all. I work in a printing place and get files occasionally as powerpoint. How about this, either make/print to eps files and display pages in Illustrator – what the use of having integration between softwares and not using! InDi and Illustrator are similar in display but use Indesign to impose and print to film and/or digital. Another option is to go to pdf and similar to before thru Illustrator. All depends on what is in Powerpoint.
For more interesting way: export your file as a web page into a folder. The export will give you the html page for the text and all images in two versions, original size and resized copy. I do this often in Word to extract photos to use in Indi. (I have not tried complex file but small ones).

By: James Fritz

James Fritz — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:48:17 +0000

@Jules – From my experience the PowerPoint to Word route usually loses some of the information and I end up just copy and pasting text anyway.

By: Jules

Jules — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:45:52 +0000

I do this regularly, but go via Word by exporting the outline of the presentation. I then assign a range of named styles to the text (this can usually be done through search and replace as at least some formatting comes across from Powerpoint).

Once the formatting is sorted out and I have added any notes text that I want, I then place the text into an ID template which already has a set of defined styles to match the ones in the Word document. The final step is to bring across the graphics, some by cutting and pasting, some by exporting, and some (where the graphic was done in Illustrator, by placing the original ID file.

I have not tried going direct from Powerpoint to ID – perhaps I should.

By: Chris P.

Chris P. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:12:07 +0000

How I go about it is I convert my Powerpoint file to PDF and import the PDF with the PDF2ID plugin from Recosoft. Although, James’ post is accomplished without the use of a plugin.