Powerpoint, Excel ... again!!

DEVONthink Feedback
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I’ve now spent more than a week using DT Pro as a demo. It’s very impressive and, I think, worth a purchase. Once again, as with many other people, the problem for me is the lack of support for Powerpoint, Excel, and then also Keynote and Pages files. I’ve read what I can find on the forums and I realise there’s a problem, but I also note that some of the requests for this support go back more than 2 years.

So a simple request: please could you give us some indication if these functions will ever appear – or at least the likelihood?

is support for these formats ever going to be possible? (And I mean legacy formats especially not future changes to formats Microsoft may make – I especially want to be able to index the 100s and 100s of files I’ve made over the past 10 years or so).

Is the problem simply one of cost for the license to such formats? Couldn’t a more expensive Premium Pro version be produced that did the job?

Isn’t there a better work around that simply ‘printing’ into DT Pro? Spotlight indexes these files (and has a plugin to index zip archives which would also be great btw), so couldn’t those indexes be somehow integrated into DT Pro?

I suspect that this particular sticking point is the one and only problem with DT Pro but it’s a huge one for me at least. I know I’m not the only one who’s hoping this situation will change.

Thanks

PS: Another work around suggestion: would it be possible to get hold of a script that would do the “print to DTP” thing for whole folders of files? Now that would also solve the problem big time. I don’t know anything about Applescript, but wouldn’t this be relatively easy to do?

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I just realized the obvious but equally if DTP scanned even just the file names for PPT xls etc files that would be a start too.

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You could use jodconverter. It uses the OpenOffice libraries to convert documents. You can for example use it to convert doc, ppt,… to pdf’s and import those in DT. It is not very mac-like to use, but it works great.

Sjmielh

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It’s not ideal, but all of the applications you mentioned should be able to “Save to PDF” (from the Print menu). You can then import that PDF into your database. This of course is not optimal if the document is still “live” (ie. you’ll still be making edits to it), but for all other documents, it should work ok.