How to View PowerPoint without Microsoft Office

Question:

My colleagues at the university send me PowerPoint presentations all the time, these pesky “.ppt” files, but since I don’t have PowerPoint on my computer, I can never open them. Surely there’s some sort of solution that doesn’t involve me paying hundreds of dollars?

Answer:

Normally you will need to Microsoft Office installed on your computer so that you can open the PowerPoint files your colleagues send to you. As a matter of fact, the PowerPoint version installed on your computer should be the same or even higher, or incompatibility problems happen.

Ever since Microsoft Office especially PowerPoint becomes the most popular program for all people at work, school or every life, people are trying to figure out alternative ways to view PowerPoint files without buying Microsoft Office, which is not cheap. Now there are a few alternative methods that enables you to view PowerPoint without Microsoft Office and one of them is provided by Microsoft itself.

Method I: Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer

Microsoft offers free PowerPoint Viewer which enables you to view PowerPoint files only, not create or edit PowerPoint. If you like it, download it below:

PowerPoint Viewer 2007 for Win

PowerPoint Viewer 2010 for Win

PowerPoint 98 Viewer for Mac

Method II: OpenOffice

OpenOffice is probably the most famous Microsoft Office alternative, which contains word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, formula editor, and database management applications. OpenOffice presentation offers almost everything that Microsoft PowerPoint can do, totally for free. OpenOffice presentation default format is ODP and you can choose to save as PPT too. You can open Microsoft PowerPoint files using OpenOffice but the formatting may change if it is a PPTX file.

Method III: Google Docs

Google Docs is a free online Office application which provides not only presentation, but also other office functions like document, spreadsheet, form, drawing, etc. The advantage is that you don’t need to download and install anything on your computer. All the works are done on the Cloud server using your browser like IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. You can directly upload PowerPoint files to Google Docs and then you can view it in your browser. Recently, Google Docs has been integrated into Google Drive for better online storage and sharing.

Method IV: PowerPoint to video

Video has much widely support than PowerPoint formats. So by converting PowerPoint presentation to video, you can directly view PowerPoint video using video player on your computer or even on portable devices like iPad, iPhone, etc.

1. Online PPT Converter

There are many online converter websites that offers free online conversion between popular formats. Online-convert.com is one of them. In the Video Converter section, choose an output video format and then upload your PowerPoint file to the site for online conversion. Very soon you will get the converted video download link. One of the reasons why I suggest this site is that you don’t need to provide Email address here.

2. Professional PPT to video converter

To keep all the original PowerPoint features like animations, transitions, audio, video clips and synchronized timings, etc., Moyea PPT to Video Converter is your best choice. You have much more output video formats to choose and you can batch convert multiple PowerPoint files to video at a time too.

With these methods you can view PowerPoint presentations freely without Microsoft Office installed now. Do you have any better ways? Please share with us in the comments.

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