Question :

My colleague sent me a PowerPoint-presentation with pictures in it that I want to use in my own Keynote-presentation. But, whenever I select a picture in the PowerPoint-presentation and drag-&-drop it onto my Desktop (as I usually do in OSX to get a picture out of a website or alike), I get a file named “Picture Clipping.pictClipping”. When I double-click on that, I get a Finder window with the correct preview and a line of info saying “Clipping contents: TIFF image”. But I can’t import that .pictClipping file into my Keynote-presentation as a picture. Neither can I find any way to get the TIFF-image out of the .pictClipping-file.

What can I do ?

Answer :

You’ve stumbled upon a hard-to-tackle problem with PowerPoint-presentations.

The solutions is rather simple, but takes a some effort. You can choose to either export  only one picture, or export all pictures from the PowerPoint-presentation :

If you only need one picture :

1- make sure you have GraphicConverter installed (if you don’t have it, you can download it from the LemkeSoft.de website for FREE and use it in “try it”-mode)

2- open your PowerPoint-presentation and drag&drop the picture you need onto the Desktop ; it will appear as a file named “Picture Clipping.pictClipping”

3- right-click on the “Picture Clipping.pictClipping”-icon and select “Open with…” from the pulldown menu that appears, then select “Other…” and select GraphicConverter 9 from the list that appears

4- GraphicConverter will now display the picture ; select “File” from the top menu bar, and “Save As…” from the pulldown menu that appears

5- in the window that opens, select select the destination folder and at “File Format:” choose JPEG/JFIF, PNG or TIFF and click the “Save”-button

6- then in the Finder, go to the destination folder and drag&drop the picture into your Keynote-presentation

…that’s it 😉

If you need multiple (or even all) pictures  :

1- make sure you have GraphicConverter installed (if you don’t have it, you can download it from the LemkeSoft.de website for FREE and use it in “try it”-mode)

2- right-click on the PowerPoint-presentation’s icon and click on “Duplicate” from the pulldown list that appears ; if your original was named “presentation.ppt” the duplicate will be named “presentation copy.ppt”

3- select the icon of the “presentation copy”-file and change the .ppt or .pptx file extension into .dat (when asked “Are you sure… ?”, click on the “Use .dat”-button)

4- now, right-click on the “presentation copy.dat”-file’s icon and click on “Open With” in the pulldown list that appears, then select “GraphicConverter” and click on it

5- in GraphicConverter, you will now see only the first picture from the PowerPoint-presentation, but in the bottom bar, you will see “Page: 1 of X” (in which X is the total number of pictures), there you can scroll through all pictures ; then, from the “File”-menu, select “Convert & Modify”

6- in the window that opens, you will see 3 columns : in the left column, make sure that “Function: Convert” is selected, and “Destination Format:” is set to JPEG/JFIF, PNG or TIFF

7- in the middle column, you will see the “From:”-button and the file named “presentation copy.dat” (with the first picture as it’s icon) ; in the right column you will see the “To:”-button ; there you should select your desired destination folder

8- then, click on the “Go”-button at the bottom of the left column (and all pictures will be exported the way you have asked)

9- do not forget to drag the “presentation copy.dat”-file to the Trash (and empty the Trash)

10- in the Finder, you can now open the destination folder and drag&drop the picture(s) you need into your Keynote-presentation

…that’s it – enjoy !