Hello OnlyOffice team,
I would like to request better support for PowerPoint sections and especially the Summary Zoom / Section Zoom feature in the Presentation Editor.
Current situation / Problem:
Many professionally created .pptx presentations use sections to logically structure the content (Home → Section → Add Section in PowerPoint).
In recent versions of Microsoft PowerPoint (since ~2016/365), users can automatically generate navigation aids from these sections:
Summary Zoom: Creates a new overview slide that contains clickable thumbnail images of the first slide of each section. It acts as a dynamic landing page / table of contents.
Section Zoom: Inserts a zoomable thumbnail that links directly to the start of a specific section.
These zoom slides allow non-linear navigation during a presentation: the presenter can jump to any section at any time and automatically return to the overview slide after finishing a section.
When such .pptx files are opened in OnlyOffice Presentation Editor (desktop and cloud version), the following issues occur:
Sections themselves are usually imported and visible in the slide sorter / thumbnails view.
However, any existing Summary Zoom or Section Zoom slides are not correctly interpreted or displayed (they often appear broken, as normal slides without zoom/navigation functionality).
There is no way to create Summary Zoom or Section Zoom slides inside OnlyOffice.
There is no automatic navigation behavior between sections (jump to section start, return to overview after section end).
Result:
Files that rely on this PowerPoint feature become practically unusable in OnlyOffice without very time-consuming manual rework (deleting broken zoom slides, creating a manual table of contents, adding hyperlinks manually, etc.). This significantly reduces compatibility with .pptx files coming from customers, colleagues or external partners who use PowerPoint.
Requested features (in order of priority):
Correct import/display and playback of existing Summary Zoom / Section Zoom elements from .pptx files created in Microsoft PowerPoint.
Ability to create new Summary Zoom and Section Zoom slides inside OnlyOffice Presentation Editor:
Automatic generation of an overview slide based on existing sections (with thumbnails of first slides per section)
Clickable zoom rectangles / thumbnails that jump to the section start
Optional return navigation to the zoom/overview slide after finishing a section
Improved section navigation support during slideshow mode (optional but very helpful):
Jump directly to section start
Visual indication of sections in slide sorter
This feature would dramatically improve real-world compatibility with PowerPoint workflows and make OnlyOffice a much stronger alternative for users/companies that regularly exchange .pptx files containing sections and zoom navigation.
Thank you very much for considering this request.
I (and I believe many corporate/educational users) would greatly appreciate this improvement.
Hello @Higgy
Thank you for the suggestion! The suggestion has been registered in our internal bug-tracker under the number 71061. Once any news comes up on that improvement I will let you know.
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