How to View Annotated PowerPoint Presentations in Ubuntu

annotation;libreofficemicrosoft-powerpointpresentationsoftware-recommendation

I have some .pptx presentation files, which were annotated with a stylus in an online class. These annotations do not show up in LibreOffice Impress 7.0.3.1 in Xubuntu 20.04 (I am using the LibreOffice Fresh PPA).

Is there any way to see these annotations with LibreOffice?
If not, can they be viewed with any other free (as in freedom) software?

Best Answer

ONLYOFFICE claims to be higly compatible with MS Office formats, and it is released under AGPL. There are many ways to install it in Ubuntu, use your favourite method.

Snap Package

ONLYOFFICE is available as a snap and can be installed with

snap install onlyoffice-desktopeditors

Debian package

A .deb-package is also available.

Flatpak

Use the following commands to install it with Flatpak.

flatpak install flathub org.onlyoffice.desktopeditors

As reported by OP, it is a bit slow to start (this is not a snap only issue, even the .deb package takes a lot of time to start compared to libreoffice), but works.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with ONLYOFFICE in any way.

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Ubuntu – open MS Office PowerPoint presentations in Ubuntu

The use of Microsoft Power Point presentations is supported by default in Ubuntu. After a fresh installation you will also have Libre Office installed.

This office suite comes with Impress, a presentation software similar to Power Point. With Impress you can not only import and view presentations including slide shows but you will also be able to export your presentations to Power Point format for use in a Windows computer.

Read more on Impress here: Libre Office - Impress

Having said that, we need to address possible issues than may arise from converting Power Point to Impress which eventually need some fine tuning after importing:

special effects or transitions may not always work as expected
the page layout may vary when using fonts not available on Ubuntu (we can, however install the MS Core Fonts for free, and any other TTF fonts)
multiple images may not be perfectly arranged

Therefore, and because we do not really know much on the presentations you have, the best approach is to just try this out. You do not have to install Ubuntu to do this. It is perfectly fine to boot your computer with an Ubuntu CD (or USB).

Instead of installing choose to "Try out Ubuntu".

Your hard drive will not be touched but you will have access to your local hard drives when opening them through the file browser Nautilus (folder icon on the left side launcher).

Your Power Point presentations can then be opened on double click with Impress.

Ubuntu – How to view and edit PowerPoint presentations that don’t render correctly

Actually, it may be font issues. Because of Microsoft's fonts are not included in the Linux OS, system substitute with specific fonts.

But these font may not be in same grid size or font attributes.

Try to install Microsoft fonts with following commands in your terminal.

wget http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/pool/contrib/m/msttcorefonts/ttf-mscorefonts-installer_3.6_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i ttf-mscorefonts-installer_3.6_all.deb

Check your documents again. And you should also check fonts such as Arial, Calibri, etc. in font list.

Best Answer

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