What Is a PPTX File?

This article explains what a PPTX file is, which programs will open one, and how to convert one to other presentation formats.

What Is a PPTX File?

A PPTX file is a Microsoft PowerPoint slide show. It can contain formatted text, objects, slides, images, videos, and more.

This is the default presentation file format for PowerPoint 2007 and newer. The older version of this format, used in PowerPoint 2003 and older, uses the PPT file extension.

How to Open a PPTX File

If you have your hands on a PowerPoint file that you just want to look at and not edit, this can be done very easily with Microsoft's free PowerPoint Viewer program. You can't edit the slides or make changes to anything like you can with a full version of Microsoft PowerPoint, but the viewer is a lifesaver if you just need to flip through a presentation someone sent you.

Conholdate.app and Online Document Viewer could be helpful, too. Just wait for your file to upload, and then follow any directions on that page to view the slide show online.

To open and edit PPTX files, without having a copy of PowerPoint, is doable with the free WPS Office Presentation or OpenOffice Impress. These are just two of several free Microsoft 365 alternatives that fully support PPTX files.

There are also some free presentation makers that can import PPTX files for editing online—no need to install any software. One of them, Google Slides, lets you upload a presentation from your computer, make changes to it, and then either keep it in your Google Drive account or download it back to your computer as a PPTX or some other format like PDF.

Google also offers the free Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides browser extension that works as a PPTX viewer and editor that runs right inside the Chrome browser. This works not only for PPTX files you drag into the browser from your computer, but also for any PPTX file you open from the internet, including ones you might receive over email. That extension also works with other MS Office formats like XLSX and DOCX.

If you want to extract images from the PPTX file, you can do that with a file unzip tool. Use one of those programs, such as 7-Zip, to open the PowerPoint file as if it were an archive, and then navigate to ppt > media to see all the images that were imported into the slide show. You can copy out any pictures you want to extract from the PowerPoint file.

How to Convert a PPTX File

If you're using one of the full-support PPTX programs mentioned above, you can easily convert your presentation to another file format by just opening the file in the program and then re-saving it under a different format. In most apps, this is done via the File > Save as option.

Sometimes, a much faster way to convert one is with an online file converter. One of our favorites for converting PPTX files is Zamzar. You can save it to PDF, ODP, PPT, and a number of image formats, like JPG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF.

A PPTX file can also be converted to a format that Google Slides can recognize. We have a guide that walks you through the whole thing: How to Convert PowerPoint to Google Slides. Once the presentation is available through Slides, you can convert it to other formats via File > Download.

Still Can't Open It?

If your file doesn't open with the suggestions from above, make sure you aren't mixing up this one with a file extension that just looks similar.

For example, PTX might look similar to PPTX, but those types of files don't open with the presentation programs described here.

A similar example can be seen with Serif PagePlus templates that use the PPX file extension. It's really easy to think that one of those is the same as a presentation file when you look at just their file extensions, but those are actually used with PagePlus.

If you double-check the suffix for your file and find that it, in fact, does not read ".PPTX," then research what it does say to learn more about the file format it might be in and which software programs are capable of reading, editing, or converting it.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How do you convert a PPSX file to a PPTX file? To edit a PPSX file, you must convert it back to a PPTX format. You can try renaming the file: find it on your computer (but don't open it), right-click, select Rename, and change the file extension from .ppsx to .pptx. If that doesn't work, open the PPSX file in PowerPoint, go to File > Save As and select PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx) as the file type before saving it.
• How do I convert a PDF to PPTX? You can download Adobe Acrobat DC to convert PDFs into PowerPoint. Open the PDF document in Acrobat DC and select Export PDF > Microsoft PowerPoint > Export. Acrobat will run optical character recognition (OCR) automatically and create a new file that you can download.
• How do you convert a PPTX to MP4? To convert a presentation to a video in PowerPoint, open the PPTX file in PowerPoint and go to File > Export > Create a Video. Enter a file name for the MP4 video file, and then click Save.