Presentation disappeared after application crash

[snobble]

(G5 1.8 GHz, 1.6 GB RAM, OS X 10.3.8, MS Office 2004, PPT 11.1.1)
I've been working for 2 days solid on a presentation that is full with
animations, sounds, etc., saving my work about every 3-5 minutes. Just
now the app crashed and when I wanted to reopen my presentation, it is
nowhere to be found. I get an error message that says: "PowerPoint
cannot access Macintosh HD:Users:name of presentation.ppt because the
file has been moved or deleted". A search on my HD for the presentation
didn't turn it up either. I'm about to be very, very sick .... Would
anyone have any clue where the file could have disappeared to?

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

Please check your preferences on the SAVE tab and see if you have a
check in the box that has PowerPoint save your presentation every so
often. If the box is not checked, then there's nothing to recover in
case of a problem.

-Jim

 

[TAJ Simmons]

snobble

I feel your pain....

These tips here are aimed at windows users, but there may be one thing that
does the trick for you.

Recovering a corrupt presentation
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00108.htm


Have you emailed the presentation to anyone during the development? (sent
items?)

saving my work about every 3-5 minutes

This is good. Better still is to add a version number on the end of the file
name

e.g. important-pres-v01, important-pres-v02. Then if you have a crash, you
only lose those last edits.

Cheers
TAJ Simmons
microsoft powerpoint mvp

awesome - powerpoint backgrounds,
http://www.awesomebackgrounds.com
free powerpoint templates, tutorials, hints and tips etc

 

[snobble]

Thanx Jim and TAJS. I do have autorecover checked for every 10 minutes.
In addition, I manually save my work about every 3-5 minutes. I had two
crashes today after which I was able to open the file again and work on
it. These were the crashes where the app tells you it had a problem and
invites you to send an error report to MS.

However, yesterday's app crash (and the one just now .....) are like
this: working on a newly started presentation with animations, sounds,
actions, etc., this time broken up in "bite-size morsels" of a couple
of slides per presentation, which I then hyperlink to each other. All
of a sudden the program will close itself down, with no error message
whatsoever and the presentation (which was autosaved and manually
saved) is obliterated from my hard disk. Nowhere to be found. No longer
exists ... not in the recent presentations list, not as a temp file,
not traceable through a search for visible/invisible items with part of
the title in it.

TAJS: your suggestions were indeed helpful (especially the version
number tip), however, there is nothing to recover or open in this case.
I am truly at a loss here.

 

[snobble]

It turns out I am not the only one who has had this problem. I've found
mentions going back as far as July 2004 and seemingly MS has been
notified of the problem but no fix has been offered yet for this
extremely serious problem. "Luckily" my 2,5 lost days of work (+ the
time needed to redo the presentation) was on a private project. I'd
hate to think of the consequences had this been a commercial project.
The best suggestion so far has been the "save versions" although not
very productivity increasing! As I have a habit of manual saving very
often, I'm also turning off autosave as it was also suggested that it
could have been a matter of a manual save coinciding with an autosave.
I shall definitely be looking into Keynote with a renewed and very keen
interest after this!

For reference I'm including here some of the URL's I found on the
issue:
http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=206349,
http://www.sgr.nada.kth.se/mac/software/powerpoint/filerborta.html.en,
http://www.macintouch.com/office2004part04.html#jun24,
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7582-0.html?forumID=28&threadID=103285&messageID=1209953

Thanx and regards,
Wilma

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Wilma,

You are the first person I've noticed who posted a message in reply that
describes what was being done when PowerPoint crashed.

There is a limit to the number of hyperlinks that PowerPoint supports.
Did you have a lot of hyperlinks?

-Jim

 

[snobble]

Hi Jim, even though all individual presentations had no more than 3-4
slides each, yes, on each of the slides there were a lot of hyperlinks
in the form of actions (clickable objects producing a sound, links to
other slides, links to other presentations, etc.) in addition to a lot
of animations. I wasn't aware of the limitation! As I'm working on a
"My first French" presentation for a child, I may be better off looking
at a multimedia authoring app perhaps as specifically the clickable
sound option is important (and Keynote lacks the "action" option). But
still ... a saved presentation should not be obliterated from a hard
disk! If it would have turned into a corrupted one I would have
(grudgingly) understood.
Thanx, Wilma

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Wilma,

The sudden disappearance of files falls into the category of "data
loss." This is the kind of problem that Microsoft tries to fix
immediately (and before the product ships).

You've helped a lot by providing a possible key ingredient. Please keep
an eye on things. If by chance you get a presentation that crashes with
the same loss of data and you can faithfully reproduce the crash I can
send to Microsoft's code writers the example and the exact steps you
took to cause the crash. I think if you (or anyone else who experienced
the crash) could provide a presentation that faithfully reproduces this
crash and loss of files then a fix is pretty much assured. I'd also need
your system information (OS version, hard drive free space, etc).

It sounds to me that you have a presentation that could be about to
crash. Go for it! Try to make the thing crash and carefully document the
steps you took. You'll be doing a lot of folks a favor by saving them
from the frustration of data loss plus Microsoft might be able to get
the problem fixed in time for the next service pack.

-Jim

 

[Andrew Chiang [MSFT]]

Hello,

I'd like to gather some more information about your environment so that we
can investigate. From your earlier posts, I gathered this info "(G5 1.8
GHz, 1.6 GB RAM, OS X 10.3.8, MS Office 2004, PPT 11.1.1)". Is this still
your configuration? I have some other questions for you:

- Is Allow Fast Saves in Preferences->Save checked or unchecked?
- Can you repro the problem w/an empty or one slide presentation?
- How are you saving? File->Save? Save button in the toolbar? Command-S?
Some other method?
- Are you saving to your local hard drive, external Firewire or USB drive,
some removable media, or a network volume?
- Are you using File Vault?
- Are you running any anti-virus software such as Norton AntiVirus? If
yes, what version is it and is auto-protect enabled? If yes, can you repro
the problem if
auto-protect is turned off?

Thanks,
Andrew

 

[peter.gelton]

Hello,

I have encountered the same problem as decribed two times the last
days. I am running PowerPoint 2004 11.1.1. (050204) on OS X 10.4.2.
Fast save is on, the presentation include only text and one matrix,
file vault is off, password on, no external media, no warnings prior,
no anti-virus and when hitting Command-S PPT goes down without any
warning and the file is lost and can't be found. When re-starting PPT
no auto-recovery is performed (although function on, once with 10 min
and once with 3 min settings). I haven't managed to repro the problem.
One of the "crashes" occured when PPT was performing the auto save.

I have been saving to the desktop. Spotlight indexing on - now turned
it off to try if that helps.

I hope you can find a solution.

Thanks,
Peter