claude said:
Hi Jim and all,
I bought a new iMac saterday and I'm running the evaluation version of "Microsoft Office 2004 Mac" and I experience the same problem. I was surfing on the net before I bought my first MAC and what I found is that it is sure that many many poeple does have the same problem, all other type of doc seems to be compatible, I found VLC very and some new codes for quicktime very usefull to WMV etc compatibility problems but I though that Microsoft powerpoint files created for PC should be compatible with Microsoft Powerpoint for MAC and as Jim said a program that would have some attributes not compatible on MAC should just disable this attribute like sound or other attribute but the reallity is that Powerpoint just crashes.
This is not a disk related problem, this is a bug of somethink that we need to install on top of Powerpoint in order to be able to handle all ppt/pps attributes.
By the way I tried OpenOffice and the same ppt files crashes both powerpoint and openoffice.
Strange isn't it !
I guess that this could be related to DirectX, sound format or something not compatible with the MAC.
So finally I should say that for people receiving many pps files jokes etc ... bying Powerpoint Office 2004 is useless in my eyes.
Thanks to everybody for the great answer on this site.
Claude
Hi Claude,
There are two QuickTime codecs that I like to install.
I like Flip4Mac and Perian.
Flip4Mac gives me the ability to view Windows Movie Player (wmv) files
in the free version of the product. If I were to purchase the deluxe
version then I could use QuickTime Pro to save in wmv format, which is
the best cross-platform format for movies, followed by AVI (with sound
not compressed).
http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28842
Perian gives QuickTime the ability to play Adobe Flash FLV files (the
ones you can get from YouTube) as well as many other formats.
http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/30931
With Flip4Mac and Perian I seem to have the vast majority of file types
that people throw at me and QuickTime Pro has become my new best friend.
Now, about the crashes when you receive presentations. PowerPoint should
not crash.
There are two possible reasons for PowerPoint to be crashing. it could
be a bug within PowerPoint, or an attempt by malicious code to take over
your computer. It's probably not possible for you to tell which is the
cause for your crashes.
Malicious code can take control by crashing a program and putting your
computer into a state where it could be controlled remotely. It is often
spread by benign appearing email message attachments just like the ones
you have been receiving. Lucky for you that you have a Mac. It's hard
for such attempts to succeed on Macs (but not impossible).
Your Windows friends should be concerned. It's possible that there is
malicious code that is succeeding on their machines, but not on yours.
It's likely that the presentation has Active-X controls in it. Active-X
is often maligned as a security risk, although whether it really is or
not is openly debated.
So what should you do?
If you can, put offending presentations someplace on the web where they
can be downloaded (use your .Mac account, for instance). Get the URL of
the bad presentation so you can send the URL to Microsoft.
After you know the URL, try opening in PowerPoint the original way and
let PowerPoint crash. When the crash report dialog opens explain what
happened and then put URL of the offending presentation into the crash
reporting dialog box. That way the people at Microsoft and/or Apple can
take a look at what's causing the crash. You will have given them have a
sold way to reproduce the problem and all the system information they need.
With this sort of information available to the developers they can fix
the problem in an update so that PowerPoint won't crash your computer
will be safer from exploitation.
Thanks.
-Jim
