Read Only Presentation

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In PowerPoint 2019, Microsoft introduced the Always Open Read-Only setting as one of the options users can use to protect their presentations. You may want to use this Read-Only setting to protect a presentation when

  • You want to prevent accidental edits and keep the content of your presentation safe.
  • You want to alert people that the presentation you provided is the final version.

After you select the Always Open Read-Only option for a presentation, when users open the presentation, they see the Read-Only recommendation and may see a message in this form: To prevent accidental changes, the author has set this file to open as read-only.

The Read-Only recommendation is a simple yet effective deterrent that discourages editing because users have to perform a task to remove it before they are allowed to edit a presentation. If you do not want users to make changes to a presentation and want to tell them about this in a polite way, then the Read-Only recommendation may a good option for you.

If a presentation with the Read-Only protection gets opened in an older Microsoft PowerPoint application—which does not support the recently introduced function—the Read-Only recommendation gets ignored (the presentation is opened normally).

Aspose.Slides for Java allows you to set a presentation to Read-Only, which means users (after they open the presentation) see the Read-Only recommendation. This sample code shows you how to set a presentation to Read-Only in Java using Aspose.Slides:

Presentation pres = new Presentation();
try {
    pres.getProtectionManager().setReadOnlyRecommended(true);
    pres.save("ReadOnlyPresentation.pptx", SaveFormat.Pptx);
} finally {
    if (pres != null) pres.dispose();
}