PPT files from Mac crash a Windows XP PC

[rich petersen]

My colleague and I often work on a set of presentations together. He's on
Office XP and I'm on a Mac with OS 10.3.5 and Office 2004. We had no
problems until I upgraded from Jaguar to Panther and from Office X to 2004.
(I know, 2 upgrades at the same time are a bad idea.)

Now when I work on a .ppt file and send it to him, his attempt to open the
file causes his machine to hang - blue screen of death and all.

These are files that we had both been able to edit before. They all have the
..ppt extension. They are based on a common .pot template. I have used the
tool to check for compatibility issues. I occasionally find bizzare fonts and
delete them, but even after cleaning out the fonts the problem can occur.

Has anybody else seen this kind of problem? I've read about PCs being
unable to open a Mac file, but to hang the PC completely? That's odd.

 

[Geetesh Bajaj]

Does this happen with just one presentation or with all presentations.

More importantly, have you tried opening the same presentation in another
Windows machine.

I'll be glad to test it for you if you can post the presentation somewhere
online.


--
Geetesh Bajaj, Microsoft PowerPoint MVP
PowerPoint Notes: http://www.indezine.com/notes
Free Templates:
http://www.indezine.com/powerpoint/templates/freetemplates.html

Technical Specialist, PowerPoint Live
http://www.powerpointlive.com




My colleague and I often work on a set of presentations together. He's on
Office XP and I'm on a Mac with OS 10.3.5 and Office 2004. We had no
problems until I upgraded from Jaguar to Panther and from Office X to 2004.
(I know, 2 upgrades at the same time are a bad idea.)

Now when I work on a .ppt file and send it to him, his attempt to open the
file causes his machine to hang - blue screen of death and all.

These are files that we had both been able to edit before. They all have the
..ppt extension. They are based on a common .pot template. I have used the
tool to check for compatibility issues. I occasionally find bizzare fonts
and
delete them, but even after cleaning out the fonts the problem can occur.

Has anybody else seen this kind of problem? I've read about PCs being
unable to open a Mac file, but to hang the PC completely? That's odd.

 

[Guest]

This has happened with different presentations, and has recurred with files
that I had previously "cleaned up." That is, I have been able to "fix" some
misbehaving files by eliminating all fonts other than arial and times new
roman, removing builds, etc. Some, but not all of the misbehaving files had
bloated from 800K to over 4MB in the process of editing on my mac. Those I
simply deleted and started over with the orignal version from my PC-using
colleague.

I will test the troubling files on other PCs today, and if possible will post a
problem file to a test server for you. Thanks!

 

[rich petersen]

It took a little while, but I tested with other PCs and reproduced the problem
100%. However, it turned out my PC-using colleague was rebooting himself,
so the application failure was in its own memory space - as one would
expect with XP.

Nevertheless, the problem turned out to be that the mac version of
PowerPoint refused to convert some text to arial, and the slide I returned to
my colleague contained something (a font?) that befuddled the XP version.
My workaround was to delete the slide and write a new one from scratch.

Following is my diagnosis and unsuccessful workaround: (1) I identified the
slide from the stack by going through the presentation one slide at a time.
Because we had used only arial, the "arial" font would appear in the font
window in the formatting bar when I did a "select all" (commad-A) for each
slide. (2) On one slide, the "select all" command would not show arial in the
window. (3) After all attempts to convert the text to arial in the text on the
"bad" slide, something still wouldn't change. (4) I copied the text from the
bad slide into TextEdit, converted to plain text, and pasted into a new slide.
Surprisingly, the problem remained.

I have solved my problem, but let me know if you would like a copy of this
bad slide. I have no idea what's wrong with the text. I've gone through it
character by character - all arial. Yet when I select the box, it's not all arial.

I can post the slide to a server if you are interested in the problem, but it's
no longer a crisis for me.