Export to Powerpoint format would be useful!

[John-W]

I recently had to produce a powerpoint slide show but had no experience of Powerpoint so struggled.

I solved this by producing it in Affinity then exporting to PDF then getting a trial pdf to powerpoint converter for the final result.

I'm sure many Affinity Publisher users would find a direct export facility very useful.

[LEB]

+1

[LEB]

+1

[fde101]

-3

 

There, it only took me one post to get ahead of your two :-)

[GarryP]

Is there anything that we would get from exporting as a Powerpoint slide show that we don’t get from exporting as a PDF?
I only ask as none of the Affinity applications support such things as animations or transitions so I’m wondering what the difference would be.
I’m not saying it would be a bad idea, I’m just curious as to why it could be a good idea.
I haven’t used Powerpoint for many years – and I wasn’t a ‘power user’ even back then – so maybe I’m missing something.

[LEB]

Hi fde101 and GarryP,

As a scientist, I have used Quark XPress, InDesign and now I am following the trend towards Affinity Publisher to produce thousands of "Powerpoint" presentations.

For me, presenting from a PDF is simply ideal and I personally do not need anything more for my own presentations.

The only limitation to this practice is that many colleagues I work with will never use or share my content if I am not able to generate a PPT file from which they can copy slides.

This is why I liked John-W's suggestion.

LEB

[Move Along People]

-

 

[LEB]

Hi haakoo,

Despite my teaching skills ;-), I doubt I can convince an entire community to abandon PPT immediately, although I agree that this can be done at the team/lab level.

Yes, one can copy parts of a PDF, but then it is uneditable... or the formatting is lost, which may not be the initial intention.

[GarryP]

Ah, I didn’t think about copying individual slides for modification and later use.

I imagine it would be difficult to re-educate a large community to be able to modify PDFs.
Having heard your arguments I’m now in agreement that being able to export as Powerpoint slides would be a good addition to the Affinity range. However, I don’t think it’s as useful to the general Affinity user-base as other functionality that many people have been waiting for, such as vector mesh warp and many others, so you could be waiting a long time for it, if it ever comes.

Having said that, and this is just pipe-dream talk (and I’m not affiliated with Serif at all and have no influence), maybe, sometime in the future, perhaps, there could be an additional Affinity Presenter application which could export Powerpoint slides with an included Animation Persona for all the fancy stuff. I have no idea how it would work but it could be a possibility if there’s a big enough market for it. The figures listed here http://powerpointinfo.blogspot.com/2012/02/powerpoint-usage-statistics-and-market.html are old but I imagine Serif wouldn’t baulk too much at getting a decent share of 500 million users. We can but dream.

[LEB]

24 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Ah, I didn’t think about copying individual slides for modification and later use.

I imagine it would be difficult to re-educate a large community to be able to modify PDFs.
Having heard your arguments I’m now in agreement that being able to export as Powerpoint slides would be a good addition to the Affinity range. However, I don’t think it’s as useful to the general Affinity user-base as other functionality that many people have been waiting for, such as vector mesh warp and many others, so you could be waiting a long time for it, if it ever comes.

I agree.

However, I imagine it is probably easier to implement the export to XML PPTX format of a well-structured document than to implement vector mesh warp and other requests.

[GarryP]

It’s probably not a question of how easy either is to implement – I have no idea which is easier – but more a question of which is a higher priority for Serif.
I have no idea what Serif’s priorities are, I only know that more people have asked for other functionality – sometimes so they can ditch Adobe products – than for PPT(X) export.
As I said above, I think export to PPT(X) is probably a good additional function, but no-one outside Serif will have any idea when anything will be implemented, if at all, so it’s probably better to find a different solution and keep our fingers crossed in the meantime.

P.S. Serif might have something up their collective sleeves that we don’t know about. Who knows?
P.P.S. I also have no idea how much of the functionality within an Affinity document can be contained within a PPT(X) document so there could be many problems to deal with there. I don't know the tecnical details.

[dominik]

3 hours ago, LEB said:

The only limitation to this practice is that many colleagues I work with will never use or share my content if I am not able to generate a PPT file from which they can copy slides.

Sorry for jumping in. The situation and problem you describe seems reasonable to me. Did you ever for this particular scenario try one of the many offerings on the internet to convert from PDF to Powerpoint?

https://www.google.com/search?q=pdf+to+powerpoint&oq=pdf+to+powerpoint&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.3982j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=images

Since you for yourself are happy with PDF this could be (after some testing) the missing link that is much more likely to work right away than AD exporting to Powerpoint at some time in an unknown future 

d.

[MikeW]

An argument can always be made for the export from an Affinity application to XYZ application format with the intention of editing/finishing in that application.

In the case of PowerPoint, why not just use PP itself. In the case of the OP...I have little sympathy. Learn how to use PP.

In LEB's case, I would still suggest using PP. If one doesn't have PP, consider using LibreOffice's Impress. It handles AD's SVG output fairly well and can export to PP.

That said, both PP and Impress can be bogged down if you convert imported graphics into an editable format even with relatively simple graphics if they have a lot of objects. In general, depending on the graphic asset I want to transfer into PP, I'll use PNGs.

[LEB]

19 hours ago, MikeW said:

In the case of PowerPoint, why not just use PP itself. In the case of the OP...I have little sympathy. Learn how to use PP.

In LEB's case, I would still suggest using PP. If one doesn't have PP, consider using LibreOffice's Impress. It handles AD's SVG output fairly well and can export to PP. 

Personally, I much prefer to use AFPUB rather than PP to generate presentations because of the better ability to place thinner images, layer effects, font and image control, etc. And I do not use transitions / animations, which I usually find useless.

 

20 hours ago, dominik said:

Sorry for jumping in. The situation and problem you describe seems reasonable to me. Did you ever for this particular scenario try one of the many offerings on the internet to convert from PDF to Powerpoint?

https://www.google.com/search?q=pdf+to+powerpoint&oq=pdf+to+powerpoint&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.3982j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=images

Since you for yourself are happy with PDF this could be (after some testing) the missing link that is much more likely to work right away than AD exporting to Powerpoint at some time in an unknown future 

I think AFPUB > PPTX is much better than AFPUB > PDF > PPTX because there will certainly be loss of some of the information during the 2 steps of file conversion, as we already see during the PDF > AFPUB conversion, despite the incredibly good work done by Affinity's staff.

[MikeW]

If you have Acrobat, it can export a pdf to PP.

One can build certain assets in AD or APub, export and bring into PP. But there isn't feature parity between the two applications. Transparency types being one of the differences, but there are others.

[LEB]

17 hours ago, MikeW said:

But there isn't feature parity between the two applications. Transparency types being one of the differences, but there are others.

I see.

Yet, this would be an export option. Features are also lost when I export an AFPUB doc as an image