[kennedy]

Anybody know how to recover the text out of a PowerPoint file?

Or anybody know how to repair a corrupted PowerPoint file?

Or any other ideas in this situation...

You started with a 34-slide file.
You saved it to a new name.
You started editing, saving periodically on the way.
You then go to save, and half way through, PowerPoint unexpectedly quits.
Restarting PowerPoint, it tells you the file is fubar.

Any ideas on how to recover my outline out of that file would be GREATLY appreciated.

[pimephalis]

Originally posted by kennedy:
Anybody know how to recover the text out of a PowerPoint file?

Or anybody know how to repair a corrupted PowerPoint file?

Or any other ideas in this situation...

You started with a 34-slide file.
You saved it to a new name.
You started editing, saving periodically on the way.
You then go to save, and half way through, PowerPoint unexpectedly quits.
Restarting PowerPoint, it tells you the file is fubar.

Any ideas on how to recover my outline out of that file would be GREATLY appreciated.

Well, as far as repairing the file I don't think I can help. However, there's a way to try to extract the text from the file using a *NIX utility from the terminal. By using 'strings', you can extract the ASCII information from the .ppt file, meaning your outline and text should be extracted. Here's what you need to do, in the terminal:

Code:
cd Directory Containing PPT File
strings filename.ppt > filename.txt

This will dump the ASCII comments in "filename.ppt" into a text file called "filename.txt". Of course, you need to replace 'filename' with the true name of the file. Then, open the .txt file in your favourite text editor and start searching for text. I tried this with a presentation downloaded from the web, and managed to extract 94 kb of ASCII from a 1.3 MB file. Most of that was gobbledygook, but at the end I found the outline and scattered around was some text from the slides themselves.

I hope this helps. Losing work really bites, and Office seems to be more masticary than most pieces of software.

[kennedy]

Sheesh, I should have thought to try that!!
I looked at the file in TextEdit and I didn't see any ASCII, so I didn't bother running 'strings' on it... but I should have, because there they were. Well, the old strings... not the new stuff I had written.

Oh well... I've recreated (best I can remember) it.

Thanks for the suggestion!!

[pimephalis]

Originally posted by kennedy:
Sheesh, I should have thought to try that!!
I looked at the file in TextEdit and I didn't see any ASCII, so I didn't bother running 'strings' on it... but I should have, because there they were. Well, the old strings... not the new stuff I had written.

Oh well... I've recreated (best I can remember) it.

Thanks for the suggestion!!

No problem. Whenever I have a funny file related problem, I always find myself reverting to grep, perl, sed and strings to figure out what is going on, then I pipe the results to my editor (often vi). I know it's soooo 70s and *NIX-neck-beard-ish, but it works and saves me a ton of frustration.

Glad you could get something back.