Generate PowerPoint 2007/2010 file using Java

java powerpoint presentationml
sreeprasad picture sreeprasad · Jan 28, 2010 · Viewed 27.4k times · Source

Does anyone know of any API (commercial or open-source) that can generate/edit PowerPoint 2007/2010 presentations through Java. I have a template in the PowerPoint 2007/2010 format that I require to edit/update. So far I have been converting the .pptx file to xml and then editing and storing it back as .pptx. But the file gets corrupted while opening.

Is anyone aware of any other method or API that do this in Java?

Answer

GrantB picture GrantB · Aug 4, 2010

We have done it programmatically (closed source at the moment, sorry) so might be able to help, but beware of a few gotchas.

One is that the POI project (at least when we looked at it last year), was quite incomplete. It didn't do PPTX Charts - which is the one feature we wanted. Infact the POI site may not be upto date, but they don't appear to support PowerPoint 20087 format (http://poi.apache.org/slideshow/index.html). Everybody recommends this project, but our evaluation was that it was pretty much useless for generating PowerPoint 2007 files via Java. Your milage may vary.

Apose also had some significant limitations when we looked at it; not doing Charts in PowerPoint 2007 being the blocking issue for us.

Another issue is that PowerPoint 2007 can be quite buggy. We have had a number of progammatically produced PPT files that caused lock ups, but when testing, we found that we can repro crashes and lock ups with simple PPTX documents created in PowerPoint 2007 - i.e. not our code.

In the end, we did the following: Unpacked a 'template' PowerPoint file to a folder, then on demand, filled the template XML with new values, zipped it up, renaming various elements & delivered it to the user as a valid PPTX. Works OK, other than the odd PowerPoint crash when people edit the file. If there was a market for it, I guess we could package up the code as a webservice (i.e xml/csv -> PPTX) or put together a commerical package, but we wouldn't do it for free.

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