How to extract slide notes from a PowerPoint file with ColdFusion

coldfusion, powerpoint

Solution

The simplest solution:

Convert the PowerPoint presentation to OpenOffice ODP format. That's a ZIP file. CFML can unzip it and inside there's a content.xml file which contains the slides and the notes, so CFML can extract the notes from that format.

Given the CFDOCUMENT functionality, perhaps ColdFusion can even convert the PPT to ODP for you?

Problem

I have a .PPT (PowerPoint, transferrable to ODP or PPTX) file with speaker notes on every slide. I want to extract the entire presentation into something dynamic so I can create a speaker cheat sheet for running on a phone or table while I talk (thumbnail of the slide with speaker notes). I do this just often enough to HATE doing it by hand. This is almost easy enough with `<cfpresentation format="html" showNotes="yes">` which splits the PPT up into HTML pages and creates an image for every slide. cfpresentation, however, does not transfer the speaker notes, they are lost in translation. I have also tried `<cfdocument>` which has no options for preserving slide notes once it converts to PDF. Is there a way to get the notes out of the PowerPoint file from within ColdFusion?

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