several PowerPoint 2004 issues

[Amoreena Farrell]

Office 2004 Standard edition, OS 10.3.4, lab setup

PowerPoint almost always hangs on startup for the regular user. Start
application, wizard appears, click OK and then spinning pizza wheel.
Force Quit, try again. Same thing.

Run permissions repair from Disk Utility. Disk Utility does not make
any repairs. Start PowerPoint and it launches normally.

Shut computer down and start back up. Login as regular user. Start
PowerPoint. Back to the spinning pizza wheel. Run permissions again,
doesnt find anything to repair, and PowerPoint launches normally.

This hang will also occur sometimes opening existing documents.
Disconnecting the attached FireWire drive seemed to fix this, but I
cannot run permissions repair each time I have a student that wants to
run PowerPoint.

I am also seeing a lot of presentations crash the program on open. I
have read elsewhere on the group that this may be a font substitution
problem?

I also have an instructor who created several presentations in
PowerPoint 2001 using the fonts Trebuchet in Wingdings. When the
presentations are opened in the 2004 version, the dingbats are all
substituted for other dingbats and the text is clipped and not
appearing correctly.

If anyone could help me with any of these issues (esp. the first one)
I would really appreciate it. At this point I'm about ready downgrade
all the machines back to v. X

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Amoreena,

Is it possible that the hard drive is spinning down on the firewire drive
and it is not spinning back up again? If your external drive spins down you
have to wait for it to spin back up again. Meanwhile you'll be seeing the
spinning beach ball.

-Jim

Office 2004 Standard edition, OS 10.3.4, lab setup

PowerPoint almost always hangs on startup for the regular user. Start
application, wizard appears, click OK and then spinning pizza wheel.
Force Quit, try again. Same thing.

Run permissions repair from Disk Utility. Disk Utility does not make
any repairs. Start PowerPoint and it launches normally.

Shut computer down and start back up. Login as regular user. Start
PowerPoint. Back to the spinning pizza wheel. Run permissions again,
doesnt find anything to repair, and PowerPoint launches normally.

This hang will also occur sometimes opening existing documents.
Disconnecting the attached FireWire drive seemed to fix this, but I
cannot run permissions repair each time I have a student that wants to
run PowerPoint.

I am also seeing a lot of presentations crash the program on open. I
have read elsewhere on the group that this may be a font substitution
problem?

I also have an instructor who created several presentations in
PowerPoint 2001 using the fonts Trebuchet in Wingdings. When the
presentations are opened in the 2004 version, the dingbats are all
substituted for other dingbats and the text is clipped and not
appearing correctly.

If anyone could help me with any of these issues (esp. the first one)
I would really appreciate it. At this point I'm about ready downgrade
all the machines back to v. X

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

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