Version control for Microsoft Power Point 2016

Question

I don't know whether this is appropriate question for this or Superuser SE. Please feel free to migrate to that if required.

Background :

I use git for my daily code or report writing. However when it comes to making power point presentations, I found limitations of git (e.g. large size files, photos, videos etc). Also I noticed that if you just open .pptx file without even changing anything , it shows modified in git .

Question:

I was wondering is there any better version control system for power point ?

Answer 1

This is basically a cultural/philosophical thing.

The UNIX philosophy is to design programs that can work together. One component of that is to prefer text-based file formats.

Most publishers of windows-based programs seem to shun cooperation outside of their own. So undocumented binary file blobs are the rule rather than the exception. The usually unstated goal is vendor lock-in.

If you didn't make a change but it still shows a difference after opening it that could be an internal timestamp in the file, or the access time in the filesystem. In that case I would just do a git checkout of the file.

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After intense market pressure, microsoft moved to an XML-based file format. A modern office document is basically a bunch of XML files packed up into a zip-file.

So a possible way to make Office files more readable for git would be to use filters to make something legible out of a diff. The git attributes page in the git book gives an example for docx files.

It seems that there is an equivalent program for powerpoint slides. So you could install that to make sense of the diffs in pptx files.

Another option would be to write a program that given the paths of two pptx files extracts them (since they are basically zip files), uses something like xmllint to format the XML files and then uses a recursive diff to find out what's changed.

Answer 2

An alternative would be to use Beamer

You define your slides as text, making it is easy to use with git.

Note that it doesn't have the power of powerpoint and the design is not as sexy...