.PPT File Format – Older versions

PowerPoint 97–2003 presentation

[MS-PPT] covers PowerPoint 97 and later. Earlier versions also used the .ppt extension, but their streams are laid out differently, and Microsoft has not published them. They cannot be read by following the steps on these pages.

How to recognise one

A file from PowerPoint 95 or earlier is still usually a compound file. The signs are:

  • There is a stream called PP40.
  • There is a Current User stream, but it is shorter than the fixed part of a CurrentUserAtom (28 bytes), or it holds a 32-bit length followed by a string.
  • There is a PowerPoint Document stream but no Current User stream.

The explorer reports such a file as older than [MS-PPT] and lists its streams, but it does not read records from it.

Dual-format files

A file saved for both PowerPoint 95 and PowerPoint 97 holds the older format at the top level and the 97 format inside a storage named PP97_DUALSTORAGE, with its own PowerPoint Document and Current User streams. The explorer reads that storage when it finds the top-level streams are not in the 97 format.