OpenOffice is pretty good at opening clean Powerpoint files, but it still happily chokes when those files contain embedded objects such as Windows Metafile images. I tried to fix the problem with apt-get install kpresenter, but that hard crashed when even trying to open the .ppt.

This may be a known bug, but the OpenOffice bug tracker contains dozens of WMF bugs, some dating back to 2002 which have been closed without resolution. And it’s tricky to submit the problem document to the bug tracker when it’s confidential…