Unleash the Graphics from your Presentations

A few days back, Tom Kulhmann wrote about how you can unleash your graphics from Powerpoint 2007 using 7zip. As a Mac user, I knew that there was bound to be an alternative. I use Stuffit Expander for most of my unarchiving efforts on the Mac. Its quite a handy tool and can deal with most formats. That said, Stuffit Expander can extract not just Powerpoint presentations, but also those from Keynote. So if you end up doing a lot of background removal kind of work with Keynote, using the Alpha blending tool, then Stuffit can help you extract those edited images from the presentation. A bit of a round-about way to do things, but that's what you can do if you lack the skill to do things in Photoshop or GIMP.

Extract the Presentation

Once you have Stuffit Expander installed, all you need to do, is right click and "Open With". You won't necessarily see Stuffit Expander in the menu. If you don't, click Other as in the picture above. You can then find Stuffit Expander in your Applications folder as in the picture below. Click Open and Stuffit should start extracting your presentations for you.

Locate your extracted folders

Once Stuffit finishes expanding, you'll see a folder for your presentation. Usually an extracted Powerpoint folder will have a .pptx suffix and its easy to spot out. A keynote folder usually will be with the same name as the presentation itself and may have a .key suffix. Take a look at the image below and you'll know exactly what I mean.

Find your media assets

Once you've located your folders, getting to your media files is simple. The Keynote media files will be in the extracted folder itself. Keynote chooses the best media format to represent the image, so usually you should see the media in the best possible quality for its size.

For your Powerpoint media files, you'll need to navigate to the ppt/media folder inside the extracted directory. You can then save this folder with whatever name you choose, just like Tom recommends on his blog. And that's that! Simple, huh?

I hope this post was useful for Mac users who'd like to do the same things that Tom proposed on his blog.

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If you liked this post, you may be interested in my other post about Elearning Experiences on the Mac