Put your PowerPoint-generated HTML on the web

When you save your presentation as Web Page from versions of PowerPoint later than 97, you're asked to choose a folder and filename to save to. It's generally best to avoid spaces, oddball punctuation or excessively long names when you choose a name.

Suppose you choose to save to a file called MyShow.htm in C:\MyDocuments.

PowerPoint creates a file in C:\MyDocuments called MyShow.htm
It also creates a folder in C:\MyDocuments called MyShow_files, and in that folder, it puts the additional image, html and other support files needed to display your presentation.

So now you have:

C:\MyDocuments\MyShow.htm and
C:\MyDocuments\MyShow_files\*.* (support files)

You doubleclick MyShow.htm to preview the presentation, it looks great, now you want to put it up on your web site for the world to see.

Suppose you want the presentation in a folder on the web server that corresponds to http://www.mydomain.com/Shows/

• Upload MyShow.htm to the folder Shows
• Create a new folder in Shows called MyShow_files
• Upload all the files from the MyShow_files folder on your hard drive to the MyShow_files folder inside Shows on your web server
• Link or send visitors to http://www.mydomain.com/Shows/MyShow.htm

Notes:

• Make absolutely certain that your FTP program is set to upload files as Binary, not ASCII. Some programs will offer to autodetect the file type and switch back and forth as needed. Fooey. ASCII uploads are guaranteed to corrupt binary files, but I've never had a Binary upload corrupt any file of any type. Set it to Binary and forget it, sez I.
• File names. Watch it! To a unix/linux server ThisFile.htm, Thisfile.htm and thisfile.htm are all different files. If your operating system, your FTP program or your happy fingers accidentally change the capitalization of file or folder names, your links will break and/or graphics will disappear.
• Many FTP programs can upload whole folders full of files and even create the folder for you on the server. If yours can, by all means let it!
• When you post PowerPoint's own HTML to your site, anyone who can view your web site can also use PowerPoint's File, Open command and type in your presentation's URL to open your presentation directly into their copy of PowerPoint, just as though you'd posted the PPT or PPS file on your site. If you want to limit this ability, delete the files OLEDATA.MSO and PRES.XML from the folder full of supporting files that PPT created before upoading it to your site.

On the whole, we're not happy about the lack of control PPT allows us. So we wrote a much more flexible way of doing the job. It's an addin called PPT2HTML. Visit for more information and a free fully functional demo.

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