Opening old PPT files

I recently tried to open an old ppt file, only to discover that Micro$oft no longer supports opening of PPT 95 and earlier. Sigh! Alas, the current Open Office also failed to open the file (open office usually manages file conversions that Microsoft fails; I could always hunt out an older open office installation and load it on a virtual machine, but that seemed like overkill for a single file conversion). Fortunately there is an easy way to open these old files, that I found on this page. It provides explanations and links to a free file conversion service offered by Zamzar. I gave it a whirl and it worked like a charm. Only one issue – I asked it to covert the old PPT file to the new PPTX format, and it failed. I tried again, asking conversion to PPT (1997-2003) format and it worked (current powerpoint 2010 that I use will open ppt 1997-2003 format files), so I opened and re-saved in PPTX format for good measure.

The Zazmar conversion service also supports a plethora of other format conversions including:

They claim to support over 1200 file formats, so you are not likely to have some format they cannot convert (and if you do, you can email them and their software engineers will have a look).