Hair-raising Powerpoint Crashes

[David Murray]

I have a new iBook and Office Mac 2004. I use Powerpoint on PC and Mac.
Never any problem on PC. However, on the Mac I am experienccing crashes
when I try to save work. I have been working and "Saving" happily for some
time, then I click "Save", the beachball appears, then Powerpoint disappears.
Not only that, the file I was working on disappears from my Hard Drive too!
This happens using a USB Disgo to save work also. The name of the file
appears in "Recent items". However when I click on it - nothing. The file
cannot be found using any file search mechanism on the Mac. I can repeat
this at the same stage in my work, time and again.

Can anyone help? I am close to ditching this program and trying the Mac
presentation software - is it "Keynote"?. How does this compare with
Powerpoint?

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi David,

Have you experienced this problem when saving to drives other than the
USB Disgo drive? If not, I would use disk utility to format the disgo
in case that drive has become corrupt (save any files from Disgo to a
different drive first). Did you check out the Disgo support web site to
see if there is a known problem?

Another suggestion is to use Disk Utility to repair permissions. It sure
sounds like something's wrong in the file system.

-Jim

 

[Guest]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for replying. Yes, I first experienced this problem saving to the
"Documents" folder on my hard drive. I then tried on the Disgo - same
problem.

Following your post I used the Disk utility to "repair permissions" and then
went back to one of the presentations that was being affected by this
problem. Same result. At the same place in the presentation where it
crashed before, I attempt to save...beach ball displays...saving "slide bar'
appears for a few seconds... then "phut"...Powerpoint shuts down and the
file is wiped in its entirety from the folder it was being saved in.

At the moment the only way around this is to wait to keep doing "Save as",
and save the file as a different name, so that when the whole thing goes
belly-up at least I can go back to a file with the data saved at the last "Save
as". I then take that file and have to use my PC to finish the presentation. It
feels more like the stone-age than the silicon-age.

Do Microsoft offer refunds on their products when they do not work?

Thanks,

David.

 

[Bill O'Hanlon]

I am on the verge of making such a switch too after happily using
PowerPoint for quite a while due to buggy software in this version of PPT.
Keynote is pretty cool, but it lacks a few features that are really nice in the
new PowerPoint version. One is seeing what slide is coming next, which
saves me from having to print out my presentation before I use it and lets
me tinker with the presentation up to that last minute. Apple will probably
add this feature in the next version of Keynote, so watch out PowerPoint.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi again,

There could be a bad slide. Try splitting the presentation into two parts.
If one part opens fine and the other part still misbehaves split it again
until you isolate the bad slide.

-Jim


Quoting from "(e-mail address removed)"

Hi Jim,

Thanks for replying. Yes, I first experienced this problem saving to the
"Documents" folder on my hard drive. I then tried on the Disgo - same
problem.

Following your post I used the Disk utility to "repair permissions" and then
went back to one of the presentations that was being affected by this
problem. Same result. At the same place in the presentation where it
crashed before, I attempt to save...beach ball displays...saving "slide bar'
appears for a few seconds... then "phut"...Powerpoint shuts down and the
file is wiped in its entirety from the folder it was being saved in.

At the moment the only way around this is to wait to keep doing "Save as",
and save the file as a different name, so that when the whole thing goes
belly-up at least I can go back to a file with the data saved at the last
"Save
as". I then take that file and have to use my PC to finish the presentation.
It
feels more like the stone-age than the silicon-age.

Do Microsoft offer refunds on their products when they do not work?

Thanks,

David.

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Ray]

I am on the verge of making such a switch too after happily using
PowerPoint for quite a while due to buggy software in this version of
PPT.
Keynote is pretty cool, but it lacks a few features that are really nice
in the
new PowerPoint version. One is seeing what slide is coming next, which
saves me from having to print out my presentation before I use it and
lets
me tinker with the presentation up to that last minute. Apple will
probably
add this feature in the next version of Keynote, so watch out PowerPoint.

I think the last poster was right...I'll bet you've got one slide that
is corrupted. I have had specifically that thing happen to me. You
need to do a binary search for it. This happened to me when I imported
a ppt file from an earlier version of ppt.

 

[Ray]

I am on the verge of making such a switch too after happily using
PowerPoint for quite a while due to buggy software in this version of
PPT.
Keynote is pretty cool, but it lacks a few features that are really nice
in the
new PowerPoint version. One is seeing what slide is coming next, which
saves me from having to print out my presentation before I use it and
lets
me tinker with the presentation up to that last minute. Apple will
probably
add this feature in the next version of Keynote, so watch out PowerPoint.

also, I have given up on Keynote ever going beyond v1...it has been
literally years. Have you noticed that if you have much on a slide
that it boggs down to the point of unusability. That's a killer for
me, so I continue with ppt.

 

[Pete C.]

I just noticed this issue with one of my users here -- not very happy
about losing a great deal of work, despite "Auto-Recovery" being
checked.

Trashed all ~/Library/Preferences/ PPT files, the Office Font Cache,
etc -- basically everything except Entourage's pref files. Still
happened.

Restarted, logged in as same user. Same behavior on same file.

Logged in as admin user, with different font libraries, did not the
same crash. Saved the file as... and logged out.

Logged back in as original user, opened the newly saved copy of the
problem file, same reault -- poof.

Get that .0.1 patch out! This is pathetic.

-p

 

[clanmurray]

I posted the original message about hair-raising PowerPoint crashes, and
still have no satisfactory answers.

1. What does it mean to do a "binary search" for a possible corrupted slide?

2. How does that help in the long-term when a presentation simply disappears
(everything gone - nowhere to be found - even with autorecover checked) in
the midst of preparation when all I pressed was "Save"?

3. As for splitting up the presentation until I find a corrupted slide in an
existing presentation, again, how does this help in the preparation of new
presentations? Is there a prophet or "misfortune teller" who can predict
when PowerPoint is going to corrupt a slide, crash, and wipe all previous
work out of existence?

4. There seems to be an increasing number of users experiencing this
problem. Do Microsoft read this Message Board? Is anyone listening? Is there
anyone out there?

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

I don't know the answer to all of your questions, but I think what they
mean by "binary search" is to divide a copy of a troublesome
presentation in half. Chances are that corruption will be in just one
half, and the other half is fine. Then divide the corrupt half again and
again until the single point of corruption is isolated. You can then
return to the original and delete just the corrupted portion, or
re-assemble all the good parts and just leave out the bad part.

PowerPoint always makes a hidden copy of any presentation that you open
so that there is a recovery file available. If PowerPoint crashes you
should receive a dialog box asking whether or not you wish to report the
crash to Microsoft. When PowerPoint reopens it should load the
presentation that you were working on. If it doesn't then it might be
worth the time to get your system repair utilities and run DiskWarrior
and TechTools Pro and then run Apple Disk Utility and repair permissions.

Also, there is an update to PowerPoint available today that should fix
some crashing and crash reporting problems. Use the Check For Updates
feature on the Help menu to get the update.

-Jim