PowerPoint – convert .pps to .ppt

In the church, there are a lot of PowerPoint presentations — for worship, seminars, you name it.  Some times, we’ll create a PowerPoint Show (a .pps file) after creating our presentation.  The benefit is, a .pps file cannot be edited, and therefore it’s harder for you to accidentally trash your file with an unintended change at the last minute when you really need things to work correctly.

But, sometimes, you need to change a file.  For example, I recently received two .pps files that had some duplicated information between them.  What I wanted to do was combine the presentation into one, but remove the duplicated information. 

I found a very  helpful article at Jalaj that offers a simple, effective solution: simply change the file extension of the presentation file to .ppt.  This tells PowerPoint to open the file in an editable form, you can do what you need to, to edit/combine/delete material.

In case this sounds like geek (I mean, Greek) to you, here’s the way you do it (with an extra step to preserve your original files):

1. Open up Windows explorer, and navigate to the directory where you have stored the .pps files.
2. Right-click on the file name, and click on “copy,” click on an open area in the explorer window, right-click, and click “paste.”
3. Right click on the new file you’ve made, and select “rename.”
4. Change the filename extension (the three letters after the dot) to “ppt” (except for the quotes, of course).  Push enter, and you’re done.

You can now open the .ppt file in PowerPoint, and print, fold, spindle, or mutilate as you wish.  The conversion works in either direction — to make a .ppt into a .pps, just change the extension.

Happy tech-ing!