[jszrules]

Hi,
Someone made a PowerPoint with a bunch of links to URLs and other slides within the document. Those links work on that person's computer. Then that person sent the document to me and another person and we are experiencing problems:

1) Some of the links to the URLs and other slides do not work and some do.
2) When I add my own link within the document to a URL, save it, close it, and then open the open the document again, the path to that URL is gone.
3) When I add my own link within the document to another slide, save it, close it, and then open the open the document again, that link sometimes points to the wrong slide?

The other recipient of this document is experiencing the same problems when he tries clicking on links or creating his own URL and Slide links.

Do these problems sound familiar? How can the sender give us the PowerPoint without having to worry whether some of the links' paths will disappear? How can we then create our own links without worrying that they will lose a path or point to the wrong place?

Thanks.

[JKT]

Could the original document be corrupted? Get the sender to duplicate the document by copy pasting the contents to a new project, saving and then sending that to see if it solves the problem. Check to make sure they aren't using the Fast Save option in their Save preferences (aka "Quickly corrupt my file for me").

If that doesn't help, get them to create a new document containing links and see if that suffers the same problem. I would hazard that it probably will not and that this is a corruption issue. If it does though, then that suggests a bug in PowerPoint. Are they using the latest version? Is it a documented issue at Microsoft (if you can ever find anything at their website... good luck)?

[jszrules]

Originally Posted by JKT

Could the original document be corrupted? Get the sender to duplicate the document by copy pasting the contents to a new project, saving and then sending that to see if it solves the problem. Check to make sure they aren't using the Fast Save option in their Save preferences (aka "Quickly corrupt my file for me").

If that doesn't help, get them to create a new document containing links and see if that suffers the same problem. I would hazard that it probably will not and that this is a corruption issue. If it does though, then that suggests a bug in PowerPoint. Are they using the latest version? Is it a documented issue at Microsoft (if you can ever find anything at their website... good luck)?

Hi JKT, thanks for the responses. I tried doing all those things on my computer first, and here is what I came up with:

- Created new document with links, saved it, closed it, re-opened it: Everything is fine. So the problem is probably with that person's document and not PowerPoint.
- Turned off Fast Save, added some links of my own to this person's document, saved, closed, re-opened: problem still persisted on my computer, where links paths disappear, etc. Maybe turning off Fast Save will only work on her computer, since my file is technically already corrupted??
- Duplicated the document, added my own links to the copied file, etc: problem was initially gone! But then a few hours later, I re-opened it again, and the paths of the links I created were missing again! Apparently this problem changes over time...???

Hypothetically, let's say duplicating the file does work. She has Windows, not a Mac, so does Copy/Paste on Windows do the same thing is Duplicate on a Mac?

Thanks again.

[JKT]

Fast Save - this would need to be done for new documents. It won't help with old ones. It is notorious (at least on the Mac) for corrupting files and adding spurious data to them.

When you duplicated the file did you just do that in the Finder? If so, that isn't the way to do it. Open the document and copy/paste the contents from it to a new project. This may help but is no guarantee by any means. Btw, I am basing this on my experience of file corruption in Word documents so it might not even apply to PowerPoint. In Word (98 and 2001 at least), the last paragraph mark contains the potentially corrupt data about the document so when trying to recover the file, you select everything other than that last paragraph mark and copy/paste it into a new document. This can sometimes save the file but not necessarily so.

Incidentally, do you have Keynote or NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org installed (NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org are free to download, btw)? You may be able to recover the file (assuming it is corrupted) by opening it in either of those and saving it as a new Keynote/OpenOffice.org file then saving it back to PowerPoint format again. More than likely, you will suffer some formatting changes doing this, but you can recover from that far more easily than from a corrupt Office document. You could also test whether the links are working as they should in Keynote/NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org.

[jszrules]

Originally Posted by JKT

Fast Save - this would need to be done for new documents. It won't help with old ones. It is notorious (at least on the Mac) for corrupting files and adding spurious data to them.

When you duplicated the file did you just do that in the Finder? If so, that isn't the way to do it. Open the document and copy/paste the contents from it to a new project. This may help but is no guarantee by any means. Btw, I am basing this on my experience of file corruption in Word documents so it might not even apply to PowerPoint. In Word (98 and 2001 at least), the last paragraph mark contains the potentially corrupt data about the document so when trying to recover the file, you select everything other than that last paragraph mark and copy/paste it into a new document. This can sometimes save the file but not necessarily so.

Incidentally, do you have Keynote or NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org installed (NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org are free to download, btw)? You may be able to recover the file (assuming it is corrupted) by opening it in either of those and saving it as a new Keynote/OpenOffice.org file then saving it back to PowerPoint format again. More than likely, you will suffer some formatting changes doing this, but you can recover from that far more easily than from a corrupt Office document. You could also test whether the links are working as they should in Keynote/NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org.

When I copy and paste all of the slides into a new document, the formatting is a little different for some reason. Don't know why...

Once I figure that out, I will disable Fast Save and try Keynote, etc...

[jszrules]

So I told the original sender to do the following...

1) Open the PowerPoint file. "Select All" of the slides and click copy.
2) Open a brand new document. Click paste.
3) Turn off the "Fast Save" option.
4) Save this new document.
5) See if behavior persists.

She said it worked for 30 minutes, then started "forgetting" links again. Don't know what's going on...

[JKT]

You mean it is doing it on her system too? In that case this sounds like either a bug in Office, or an unrecoverable (in Office) corrupt file. Next stage is to try OpenOffice.org/NeoOffice/Keynote as a means of recovering the file.

[jszrules]

I think we figured out the problem...JKT, you mentioned it in your first response. Between the sender and the receivers, three different versions of PowerPoint were being used...I guess that'll do it.

[JKT]

Praise be for the universal compatibility you "get" by using MS Office...