PowerPoint: PPT vs PPS

Wednesday, July 26, 2006 around 1 pm mountain time

The main difference between PPT and PPS is how PowerPoint treats the files when they are initially opened.

In my day-to-day work I see on average one hundred million PowerPoint presentations. Okay, maybe not that many, but a lot. After all it is the Navy. And as with everything government-related, if it is not in a PowerPoint, it cannot be done. A developer in my team came to me with a question today: what is the difference between a PPT and a PPS? I immediately replied that PPS was an antiquated file extension from Office 97 or something. It turns out I was dead wrong. (Have you seen that Office PowerPoint 2007 will be naming files .pptx?)

Thanks to Indezine, here’s the deal:

  • By default, PPT files open in edit mode within PowerPoint allowing you to use all the menus and commands.
  • By default, PPS files open in slideshow (play) mode and you see no PowerPoint interface. When the presentation finishes (or you manually exit), PowerPoint also quits.

So there you have it. The next time you’re whipping up a fancy-pants PowerPoint, remember to use “Save As…”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 1 pm and is filed under applications, design, microsoft, work.

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