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How can I find out which version of PowerPoint was used to create a particular document?

General answers welcome, answers describing how to do it using PowerPoint 2011 (Mac) are even better. I'm assuming there must be a way to ask PowerPoint to report this information.

Szabolcs
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  • How are we suppose to know? What is the exact file extension? – Ramhound Oct 23 '13 at 17:27
  • @Ramhound It sounds like you didn't understand the question completely. I'm looking for a *method* to find this out, not just looking to determine the creator version for one single file. I'm interested in both ppt and pptx. – Szabolcs Oct 23 '13 at 17:42

1 Answers1

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There may be a more elegant way, but this method works for all versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 or later on all operating systems:

  1. Change the file extension from .pptx to .zip (in truth, that's all the file really is, a compressed zip folder)
  2. Open the zip file and then the docProps folder
  3. Open the app.xml file in a text editor (e.g. TextEdit)

Look at the last tag, <AppVersion>. The number in that tag will correspond to the internal version number of that version of Office, which can be found in the Title/Version column on this Wikipedia article. For instance, one document I tried this on lists the app version as 14.0000, which corresponds to Office 2010 (Windows) and Office 2011 (Mac). As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell if it was made with the Mac or Windows version because the files created by each are functionally identical.

Thunderforge
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  • Thanks, this is useful. The last missing step is indeed to determine if it was made with the Mac version or the Windows version. The two are not 100% compatible unfortunately (e.g. the Mac version lacks the new equation editor). – Szabolcs Oct 23 '13 at 18:11
  • The equation editor (for Office 2013) seems to just use the Cambria Math font (which is included in Office 2011) and the 2006 specification `http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/math` (which isn't an actual web address), so I'm surprised that Office 2011 wouldn't support equations made in the Windows version. If the equation editor is the only issue, you could search for that string in the files of the `ppt/slides/` folder, although that may be more trouble than its worth. – Thunderforge Oct 23 '13 at 18:39
  • The new style equation editor is available only in Word in Windows 2007 and Mac 2011. It's available in PowerPoint as well in Windows 2010 and 2013. Unfortunately not in Mac 2011 :-( – Szabolcs Oct 23 '13 at 18:45