Read Only Presentation

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 Python via .NET 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 Python using Aspose.Slides:

import aspose.slides as slides

with slides.Presentation() as pres:
    pres.protection_manager.read_only_recommended = True
    pres.save("ReadOnlyPresentation.pptx", slides.export.SaveFormat.PPTX)

Note: The Read-Only recommendation is simply meant to discourage editing or stop users from making accidental changes to a PowerPoint presentation. If a motivated person—who knows what they are doing—decides to edit your presentation, they can easily remove the Read-Only setting. If you seriously need to prevent unauthorized editing, you are better off using more stringent protections that involve encryptions and passwords.