Universal Viewer and PowerPoint files

[Victoria]

Hello,

I’m working with mainly PDF and original PowerPoint files in Omeka 2.5.1. I love the Universal Viewer Plugin for PDFs so our team removed the Omeka image from the record and moved the Universal Viewer above the metadata. Only problem with this is we can’t make it work with .ppt.
Looks like the Universal Viewer doesn’t pick up the file. There’s a black view with a centered rotating grey box. If you choose to download it, there is no file to download.

Is there a way for the Universal Viewer to at least show the file so it can be downloaded if it can’t actually support a .ppt?
Forgive me if it can support .ppt and I’m failing to see our error.

Thanks for your time!
Victoria

[Daniel_KM]

UniversalPlayer has the possibility to read any files as long as there is an internal plugin for it. There is one for images, for pdfs, audio, video, 3d files, but not for powerpoint, word or excel files. These types of files are very hard to manage, because they are not really open and standardized (you have to get the original product, and the right version, to read it, and you are not sure you’ll be able to read it in some years).

So the quick and better solution is to convert all your files to a standard format (pdf or OpenDocument). This is required for long term preservation anyway.

If you find an open source javascript on the web to display this type of files, ask to somebody to integrate it inside the viewer.

For the last point, this is not possible too currently, but you can ask on https://github.com/universalviewer/universalviewer to add this feature, it is relatively simple. In the mid-term, you can change the code in your theme like this, for one file:

$unsupported = array('ppt', 'pptx', 'doc', 'docx');
$file = $item->getFile();
if (in_array(strtolower(pathinfo($file, PATHINFO_EXTENSION)), $unsupported)):
    echo '<a href="' . $file->getWebPath() . '">' . __('Download original file %s', $file->original_filename) . '</a>';
else:
    echo $this->universalViewer($item);
endif;

[Victoria]

Thanks, Daniel_KM.

Yeah, I’m aware of the lack of stability with .ppt, but many of them happen to have dynamic content. I did covert to PDFs, which are also added to the exhibits, but they convert without the media files embedded in the original .ppt. I can’t remember why I decided against converting them to OpenDocument, but I’ll look into that again. I’ll also look in to the code you shared.

Thanks for your help! I’ll let you know which route we go with.

[Daniel_KM]

Note that OpenDocument files are not supported by UniversalViewer too, but chances to be integrated in it in a near future are greater…

[Daniel_KM]

You may try the Google Doc viewer too (https://omeka.org/add-ons/plugins/docs-viewer/).