Unable to open .ppta's with Presenter

Feb 10, 2015

We're speculating that when there's video and audio already married in the project, Articulate has trouble reading/opening the file. 

Do we have to re-create the Articulate file from the original .pptx?

 

Thanks!

 

3 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hi Erin!

Do you not have access to the original Powerpoint file?

The PPTA file is a container created by Articulate Presenter to store resources for your presentation, such as audio clips, videos, web objects, quizzes, interactions, and more. It must be kept with your PowerPoint file at all times. See this article for more information.

We would not expect you to be able to 'open' the ppta file. You can use a program such as 7zip to peek into what is contained there though if that assists you.

Jeff Schlaybach

Leslie,

Spent hours searching in the Articulate Presenter Forum (2009) for a way to pull apart the ppta file, strip it of bogus content (the ppta file grows very large over time and has web objects and audio resources that have long been deleted yet never seem to go away) and then put it back together again. Good discussions on using 7zip to view content, etc. by Tom, your blogger, but nothing that explains how to put the files back together (re-compress).

I tried using 7zip to create a compressed .zip and .7z which I then renamed to .ppta with the same name as the .pptx file, but when I click on an Articulate icon in PPT it complains that it can't open the project file.

I don't want to go down the time consuming method that I've read about in other posts of generating a new project and then importing the assets. When I look at the ppta contents it is only a few files away from being cleaned up (In my case it would go from 7MB down to 500KB) just by removing leftover content.

Note: I removed the references to the material I deleted from the _rel.lst file just to keep things in sync. Could a developer please provide the 'decoder ring' on how to re-compress the extracted and modified ppta contents?! I'm sure you don't want to make this a general rule so if you like, please send a developer's reply privately. Thanks much.

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.