My War With Powerpoint

[Matt]

OK - get ready for a long one....

My step-father gives courses/lectures on hand therapy. He does his entire class in Microsoft PowerPoint. He has about 7 presentations that are over 100 slides each, and the largest one is about 600 slides. Just about every slide within his presentation has a picture, either scanned from a photograph or slide, uploaded from his digital camera, or taken from other digital media. For about 3 years he was doing his presentations on his laptop using Office 97, no problems. Then one day, he opened up his presentations to find that many of the pictures, randomely, had been replaced by a red X. Now, this isn't the type of X you'd see on a website when the image is missing, but just a huge red X. I know that this has nothing to do with the images being missing because when you create a presentation, the images are actually part of the presentation (hence why when you burn the presentation to a disc, you don't have to burn the image files along with it). He went through and replaced the defunct images, and carried on with working on his course. Eventually, it happened again, again seeming random. So, my first thought was that this was an issue pertaining to Office 97. So, we went and purchased Office 2003. Upgraded the whole sha-bang. He's working with Office 2003 for a while, all seems fine. Then, it happened again. Random Xs had replaced images. Well, this couldn't continue. Not only was he losing hours of work having to redo many slides over again, but he was in fear that when he'd go to give his lecture (which could be anywhere in the country) it would come up with messed up slides. My next thought was that it was a harddrive issue. He had been having some harddrive problems before, and maybe as it wrote to the drive, things were becoming corrupt. So, we bought an external harddrive. He was working with his courses only off the external harddrive now. But lo and behold, it happened again! Finally, I decided there was just something wrong with his laptop that I just couldn't figure out. So, we transfered all his work onto our desktop for him to work off of. And as you can imagine, it happened again. At this point ini time, I caved in and called Microsoft. They took me through some steps, saying that my display driver needed to be adjusted and my temp files cleared. We did all that, and it didn't help. Finally, they said it had to do with JPEGs. (They linked me to an article on their support site about it, but I ca't find it) They said that when you put JPEGs into a MS Office Document, there's a chance that it will become corrupt. Instead of causeing the entire Document to go corrupt, PowerPoint will replace it with a red X. I was told that the only way to fix this is to change the format of the image (to bmp), and place it back into the presentation.

There enlies the problem. We have 2000+ images on the computer and incoorporated into the presentations. It may not be so bad to find a program that can automate the image type conversion to bmp (by the way, if anyone knows of a free program that will do that, that would be great!), but to go back, and basically redo presentations that have been "unfinished pieces of work" for 3 years is pretty much impossible. To find all the pictures, match them with their assigned slide, and placed the converted version back in, is just too much.

So here enlies my hope on anyone. Can you think of a better way to do this? Has anyone ever had this problem before and found an easier way to correct it? Also, once incorporated into the presentation, why does the original file type of the image matter any more??

Any help on the situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

[TheTerrorist_75]

IrfanView can do batch conversions. The best thing is it's free. Chappy just used it to do his wallpapers he posted. I haven't found out everything it does, but it is an amazing image editing program. I believe it evens does slideshows.

[JDoors]

I don't have any additional advice other than agreeing that Irfanview could be used to batch process the conversion to BMPs, but I had to say, wow, that totally sucks.

Computers suck, that's my advice.

On the file type issue, PP may store the image as a DAT file (just guessin' on that point) but within that DAT file is the original format.

At least, according to Microsoft, once converted to BMPs you won't have this problem again.

[screi]

..but i'm wondering what explanation there is for the jpeg files getting "corrupted" in the first place...power point has been around for a long time...you'd think that if the program had a problem with corrupting certain file types..the issue would be well documented and/or fixed a long time ago..???

[Dragon]

..but i'm wondering what explanation there is for the jpeg files getting "corrupted" in the first place...power point has been around for a long time...you'd think that if the program had a problem with corrupting certain file types..the issue would be well documented and/or fixed a long time ago..???

why fix it? they are more worried about their Xbox and Windows Vista to worry about a program they designed for presentations.

IMHO, OpenOffic.Org is the way to go for those. but once again you are still in the same boat. I have to agree with the infranview idea, it would be a quick way to do it, but regardless of how you still have to replace the images in the pp files with the bmp files.

[KeithLDick]

More than likely those PowerPoint Presentations *Also Contain Text Along with the Pics* on one slide..

I don't think Ifranview does that does it???...

[Matt]

Thanks all for the insight, especially TT75, I'll check out IrfanView. I am also going to see what OpenOffice can do with this. Unfortunately, these problems aren't emidiate, and aren't every time. So we'd have to work with OpenOffice for a while and hope it doesn't happen with those. Yes, it will be a pain to replace every image. After talking it over with some other folks we decided the best thing to do isnot replace all the images right now. As/If they go bad, then we can cross the bridge of replacing with a bmp file. Lucky for us, this hasn't happened to every image, just a few. So, if we replace things as they happen, we may be able to cut down a lot of work. I'm still pretty pissed that PowerPoint hasn't found a way to handle this yet, but what can you do? If anything else happens or comes up, I'll be sure to let you all know.

Matt

[handplane]

Hey Matt,

Have you seen this http://www.awesomebackgrounds.com/powerpointtips.htm.

Scroll down to the big red X and see if this will help you.

[Matt]

Hi handplane. Most of that MS had told me. I told my step dad for the time being to use "Paste Special" and see if that helps. We'll see

Matt

[JDoors]

I'm beginning to see where PP might be led astray. Not only is DDE (or whatever current special handling PP uses) known to be not 100% reliable, JPEG standard has many permutations. Maybe some files do not strictly adhere to any of those standards, or PP may have trouble with some of the less common ones. The BMP format has less variations so would be inherently easier to deal with.

[Matt]

Ok - We've found a sort of "band-aid" solution. We discovered that while working on the presentation, all the images are fine. We also found we can save, close, and re-open it, and the presentation is still fine. The problem lies only when the computer has been shut down, and then booted up again. After a restart, the random Xes appear. So, what we have decided to do, at least until we start replacing the images, is to work on the presentation, and not to turn off the computer. Then, once it is finished, we will burn the "clean" copy of it to a disc. That way, the read only disc will never be over written with a corrupt copy. (we've tried this, and so far it looks to work). Then, when finally finished, the computer can be shut down, and we will have disc copies to present off of.

Until the image conversion, I guess this is our "work around."

Thanks again for all the input from everyone on this.