Old Powerpoint presentation WAY slow in 2004

[Sammy]

I recently bought a new 1 GHz iBook with 768MB RAM, and upgraded to
Office 2004. One of my presentations - a large file (170MB) which played
fine in Office for OSX on my old 800MHz iBook - now loads so slowly that
it is just about unplayable with my new Powerpoint on my new, faster,
computer.

If I run the same file on a Windows machine running Powerpoint, it's
fine.

THe presentation was composed on my Mac, and I believe still runs fine
on the old machine.

Any suggestions? This thing has evolved over time, and the images are
too precious for me to discard and start from scratch.

Thanks!

 

[Guest]

I had similar problems. In my presentation files, if the slides have jpg-
format pictures, the slides loading are very slow so that i can't use it. But if I
replaced the pictures with emf format, the slides plays smooth. I don't know
how to solve this problem. because emf format distorted the horizonal
scales. I checked the memeory usage of the powerpoint program, the
program used more than 200M memory and kept increasing when it loaded
a file of 6MB. ? virus or bugs? Help, please.

I had powerbook, 1GHz, 512MB RAM. office 2004

 

[Sammy]

I had similar problems. In my presentation files, if the slides have jpg-
format pictures, the slides loading are very slow so that i can't use it.
But if I
replaced the pictures with emf format, the slides plays smooth. I don't know
how to solve this problem. because emf format distorted the horizonal
scales. I checked the memeory usage of the powerpoint program, the
program used more than 200M memory and kept increasing when it loaded
a file of 6MB. ? virus or bugs? Help, please.

I had powerbook, 1GHz, 512MB RAM. office 2004

That's EXACTLY my problem! There were perhaps 90 slides in my 115 MB
presentation, of which about 70 were jpegs. After about the 30th slide,
load time has become so long that the thing becomes unusable, and I get
a dialogue box saying Disk Full! Application Space is Limited, Try
Closing Open Programs to Continue. And that's with about 1 GB of open HD
space.

And that's on my 1GHz G4 iBook with 700+ MB of RAM; the same
presentation is running smoothly on my G3 800MHz in PowerPoint X...

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

How big are the JPGs (pixel measurements)?

JPGs compress very very well but to display them, PPT has to decompress them.
If your images are bigger than they need to be, that might account for the
excess memory usage. The JPG file's size in K has near nothing to do with the
amount of memory needed to hold the uncompressed image.


--
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================
Featured Presenter, PowerPoint Live 2004
October 10-13, San Diego, CA www.PowerPointLive.com
================================================

 

[Sammy]

I'm not a sophisticated enough user to say how big the JPGs are in my
presentation, but I don't know if that's the answer, since the exact
same presentation plays at normal speed in Powerpoint X on my
significantly slower G3 iBook, while stalling in Powerpoint 2004 on my
much faster G4 iBook...

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

It may be a combination of both. We can't do much to change the way 2004 acts,
but using correctly sized JPGs might help it act better.

Do you have image editing software? If so, try opening one of the original JPGs
in it to see how big it is.

I'm not a sophisticated enough user to say how big the JPGs are in my
presentation, but I don't know if that's the answer, since the exact
same presentation plays at normal speed in Powerpoint X on my
significantly slower G3 iBook, while stalling in Powerpoint 2004 on my
much faster G4 iBook...

--
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================
Featured Presenter, PowerPoint Live 2004
October 10-13, San Diego, CA www.PowerPointLive.com
================================================

 

[Sammy]

I know that in terms of MB, the pictures are up to about 1.2 MB.

But I don't understand why the presentation plays smoothly in the slow
system with the old software, and stalls out in the fast system with the
new software.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I know that in terms of MB, the pictures are up to about 1.2 MB.

If they're highly compressed JPGs, then they're probably WAY too big for screen
show purposes. I can't say w/o more information from you.

But I don't understand why the presentation plays smoothly in the slow
system with the old software, and stalls out in the fast system with the
new software.

I don't understand either. It shouldn't be worse but it is, at least on your
system.

I'm simply trying to help you find a way to make it behave better since we can't
change the software.

--
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================
Featured Presenter, PowerPoint Live 2004
October 10-13, San Diego, CA www.PowerPointLive.com
================================================