Viewing old ppt files

I ran into an interesting issue earlier this year: I went to look at an old PowerPoint slide deck (from 1996!) that I had created during my undergrad degree, only to find that the format was so old, PowerPoint 365 would not open it. I got an interesting message from within the PowerPoint app: "PowerPoint can't open this type of file" then the location link.

Oh-kay....

So - of course - I scurried around the web looking for a solution. Microsoft had all sorts of psychobabble about fudging around with formats, file extensions, and other rubbish; which were all absolutely useless 'solutions'. 

However, I found an article by Technology Trish who had run into this problem before (2007). It turns out that an enterprising soul has built an online conversion platform where we simply upload our old file, select our desired output version, click convert, and wait (Zamzar, 2024). And it is free. By going free we are limited to converting only two slide decks per day, but that should be enough for most of us. Brilliant!

We simply go to https://www.zamzar.com/ (Zamzar, 2024), and upload our ancient slide deck. I selected "pptx" as my file type, converted, and waited until the old deck had converted, then downloaded it and saved it alongside my original file. Now I should be future-proofed for the next thirty years.

Too easy.

Sam

References:

Technology Trish. (2007). Old PPT files Won't open in PowerPoint 2007 / 2010. PPT Alchemy. http://www.pptalchemy.co.uk/convert_PPT_95.html

Zamzar. (2024). File Conversion Made Easy. https://www.zamzar.com/