Open a Presentation in Python

Overview

Beyond creating PowerPoint presentations from scratch, Aspose.Slides also lets you open existing presentations. After loading a presentation, you can retrieve information about it, edit slide content, add new slides, remove existing ones, and more.

Open Presentations

To open an existing presentation, instantiate the Presentation class and pass the file path to its constructor.

The following Python example shows how to open a presentation and get its slide count:

import aspose.slides as slides

# Instantiate the Presentation class and pass a file path to its constructor.
with slides.Presentation("sample.pptx") as presentation:
    # Print the total number of slides in the presentation.
    print(presentation.slides.length)

Open Password-Protected Presentations

When you need to open a password-protected presentation, pass the password through the password property of the LoadOptions class to decrypt and load it. The following Python code demonstrates this operation:

import aspose.slides as slides

load_options = slides.LoadOptions()
load_options.password = "YOUR_PASSWORD"

with slides.Presentation("sample.pptx", load_options) as presentation:
    # Perform operations on the decrypted presentation.

Open Large Presentations

Aspose.Slides provides options—particularly the blob_management_options property in the LoadOptions class—to help you load large presentations.

This Python code demonstrates loading a large presentation (for example, 2 GB):

import aspose.slides as slides
import os

file_path = "LargePresentation.pptx"

load_options = slides.LoadOptions()
# Choose the KeepLocked behavior—the presentation file will remain locked for the lifetime of 
# the Presentation instance, but it does not need to be loaded into memory or copied to a temporary file.
load_options.blob_management_options.presentation_locking_behavior = slides.PresentationLockingBehavior.KEEP_LOCKED
load_options.blob_management_options.is_temporary_files_allowed = True
load_options.blob_management_options.max_blobs_bytes_in_memory = 10 * 1024 * 1024  # 10 MB

with slides.Presentation(file_path, load_options) as presentation:
    # The large presentation has been loaded and can be used, while memory consumption remains low.

    # Make changes to the presentation.
    presentation.slides[0].name = "Large presentation"

    # Save the presentation to another file. Memory consumption remains low during this operation.
    presentation.save("LargePresentation-copy.pptx", slides.export.SaveFormat.PPTX)

    # Don't do this! An I/O exception will be thrown because the file is locked until the presentation object is disposed.
    os.remove(file_path)

# It is OK to do it here. The source file is no longer locked by the presentation object.
os.remove(file_path)

Info

To work around certain limitations when working with streams, Aspose.Slides may copy a stream’s contents. Loading a large presentation from a stream causes the presentation to be copied and can slow loading. Therefore, when you need to load a large presentation, we strongly recommend using the presentation file path rather than a stream.

When creating a presentation that contains large objects (video, audio, high-resolution images, etc.), you can use BLOB management to reduce memory consumption.

Control External Resources

Aspose.Slides provides the IResourceLoadingCallback interface that lets you manage external resources. The following Python code shows how to use the IResourceLoadingCallback interface:

# [TODO[not_supported_yet]: python implementation of .NET interfaces]

Load Presentations Without Embedded Binary Objects

A PowerPoint presentation can contain the following types of embedded binary objects:

VBA project (accessible via Presentation.vba_project);
OLE object embedded data (accessible via OleEmbeddedDataInfo.embedded_file_data);
ActiveX control binary data (accessible via Control.active_x_control_binary).

Using the LoadOptions.delete_embedded_binary_objects property, you can load a presentation without any embedded binary objects.

This property is useful for removing potentially malicious binary content. The following Python code demonstrates how to load a presentation without any embedded binary content:

import aspose.slides as slides

load_options = slides.LoadOptions()
load_options.delete_embedded_binary_objects = True

with slides.Presentation("malware.ppt", load_options) as presentation:
    # Perform operations on the presentation.

Create a Presentation in Python Retrieve and Update Presentation Information in Python