When I open ppt files in LibreOffice Impress the format is not the same as in MS PowerPoint. The images and the text are not properly aligned.
Are there any tips on how to open MS PowerPoint documents so that that they are rendered properly in LibreOffice Impress?
It might be something as simple as font substitution. If the fonts used in the presentation are not available on the computer, LibreOffice/the OS will use different fonts instead. This can throw your text alignment off.
This became very noticeable for a lot of people with the introduction of MS Office 2007. From this version on Powerpoint and other programs in the package use Microsoft's ClearType fonts (most notably Calibri) by default. However these fonts are not pre-installed on older versions of Windows (before Vista) and operating systems from other manufacturers.
In some of these cases it is possible to aquire the necessary fonts. oooninja has documented ways to get the Cleartype fonts on Windows XP and Linux.
PPT is a proprietary format that is not well supported by other applications. Microsoft has made the specifications for the PPT binary format available, but I don't know how complete the specifications are, and many software developers may not have the time to implement an entire new set of specifications for a format that only PowerPoint uses.
On the other hand, the OpenDocument Presentation format (.odp and .fodp) is an open standard that is supported by OpenOffice/LibreOffice, NeoOffice, and Apache Open Office, as well as PowerPoint. If you save the presentation as ODP in PowerPoint, then Impress should have no problem displaying it as it looked in PowerPoint.
Then there's Office Open XML, which is Microsoft's pseudo-open standard. It's also supported by PowerPoint and LibreOffice. However, the specification is incomplete, and Office Open XML files still contain binary parts which only PowerPoint really knows what to do with. So that's another option, but probably not a very useful one.
If your presentation does not have any animation or embedded video/music, the simplest way to ensure proper rendering on MS Powerpoint is to export each slide as an image, create a new presentation in Impress, and insert an image per slide. This presentation in pptx or ppt format will render perfectly on Powerpoint because it's only an image and not formatted text being rendered.
