Send Presentation to Word problem

[Tito Harris]

Hi there,

Programms involved:
Windows XP Version 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 : Service Pack
2) Excel 2003 (11.6355.6360) Word 2003 (11.6502.6360) SP1
PowerPoint 2003 (11.6361.6360) SP1
(1GB of RAM)

Problem:
When using the Send to Word command in PowerPoint it starts to create the
slide/pages in Word but suddenly stops in page x. When I switch back to
PowerPoint a get an error message along the lines of: PowerPoint can't
communicate with Office Word. I click OK and nothing else happens.

Steps to recreate the problem on my machine...
1. I open a presentation
2. File, Send to..., Microsoft Office Word...
3. In the dialogbox I chose the options Blank lines below slides and Paste
then click OK.
4. Word activates and startes to create slides with blank lines but suddenly
stops after x pages...
5. I switch back to PowerPoint and see the msgbox with the message:
PowerPoint can't communicate with Office Word.

So a big part of the slides are missing in the Word document and I haven't
found a way to do it (on my computer at home it works fine)...

Help would be much appreciated...

Regards from Switzerland,

tito

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Hi Tito,

It sounds like there is an object on one of the slides that has PowerPoint @
work stumped. This is probably an OLE object that was pasted in from a
program loaded on the home computer but not on the computer @ work.
Whatever the case, PowerPoint is verklumpt over it. While PowerPoint is
sitting there scratching its CPU to figure it out, it stops talking to Word.
This is fair, it doesn't have anything to tell Word yet. However, Word
knows its buddy, PowerPoint, started to tell it something important, so Word
sits there with the attitude, "I'll wait as long as it takes for the rest."
Unfortunately, during this time, PowerPoint has shrugged it's shoulders and
said, "I don't know", and sends an error to you, the operator.
Interestingly enough, you can't see the error that PowerPoint threw while
Word has focus. Hence the behavior you have experienced.

To solve this problem, try to find which slide it is (by eliminating slides
from a **copy** of the presentation). Once you know which slide it is, try
to find which object it is. Then save that object as a picture (right click
=> Save as picture) and re-insert.

You may be wondering (even if not until after I mention it) why PowerPoint
can display the objects image if it can't understand the object. The answer
is in the magic of OLE. Part of the OLE object is a picture of the object
as sent by the source program, the rest of the object may not be understood,
but the picture part is. Pretty cool, huh? Well, as you have discovered,
yes and no. Yes, it can show you an image, but there is a lot of data that
is not displayed, so the file size grows. Also, when you try do perform
some operations on the file, it will hang. The bottom line is that you will
probably get away with cut and pasting OLE objects 99% of the time, but that
1% that gets you, gets you good. Recommendation: Save all images to the
HDD first as graphics files, then insert into PowerPoint.


--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
http://billdilworth.mvps.org
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