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It should be under Slide Show/Set up Show. If you only have one monitor (i.e., not hooked up to a projector), the option might be greyed out.

You’ve gotten great advice in this thread, and I was really surprised to read that hardware acceleration took care of this for you. But it’s really great that it did!

I just wanted to toss out some info for anyone else who may run into this problem. Often it’s an issue with some projectors and some laptops–essentially the movie (AVI, QT, MPEG, whatever) will play on the laptop screen but not on the projected screen. Sometimes the easiest workaround is to set the projected screen as the primary monitor (of course that means the laptop screen would be the secondary monitor) so the video will play there. A black box on the laptop isn’t as bad as a black box on the version the audience sees, you know.

…just tossing out some additional info.

MS ought to change the description on the hardware acceleration slider so that it reads: “how much do you want to push your luck?”

You are SO not kidding! Kicking back hardware acceleration and updating (or sometimes reverting to older) video drivers resolves so many problems it’s scary. Too bad it doesn’t take care of all of them, though!

This will be hard to diagnose unless we can pin it to some type of activity. For instance, when PPT crashes, are you editing text? Changing fonts? Trying to print? Exiting the program? Simply running the presentation in show mode? Any hints will help. Also, if you can find any information in the details of the error message, those might help as well.

You are sending the error to MS, right? Sometimes you might get lucky and actually be taken to a KB article that describes a fix! I’ve seen it happen, honest!

At any rate, the first thing I’d try here is updating your video drivers from your computer mfg’s website and turning hardware acceleration down a notch or two. (Right-click desktop, choose properties, then settings. Advanced or Troubleshooting tab will have the hardware acceleration.) Those two things often resolve random crashes, believe it or not.

Oh, and make sure you have a printer driver installed locally on the machine. Sometimes PPT does bizarre things if it can’t locate a printer driver–happens often when the drivers are on a network, for instance, and the laptop’s not docked. So just install a printer driver on the machine itself and set that as the default. The printer doesn’t really have to be hooked up to the computer.

Just make sure that your sound file is in the same folder with your presentation before you insert it into the presentation. That will create a relative link so that the PPT file can find the sound file on the CD.

When you burn the files to CD, burn the contents of the folder to the CD–you don’t need to put the folder itself on the CD, though. Include both the presentation and the sound file, of course.

The Expand Slide feature has been gone since PPT 97. http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00411.htm%5B/url%5D will give you some options for restoring that functionality, though.

Wow, there are lots of things.
Apple just introduced Keynote.
There are a million photo album-type presentation packages.
There’s Astound, but I don’t know if it’s being updated any longer. Same with Freelance and Harvard Graphics and Persuasion.
A search on Google for Presentation Software turns up a bunch specifically targeted for churches.
There’s the Open Office presentation package, Impress.
Corel Presenter is another.
There’s also Flash and a slew of programs designed to convert PPT files to Flash.

A screen grab pasted into PPT will show the page, but the links won’t be active.

Best way around this that I know of is Shyam Pillai’s Live web addin. http://www.mvps.org/skp%5B/url%5D

Hi, Jim.
I’ve been hoping somebody would have good ideas for you, but since none have been posted, I’ll just suggest that you call MS Product Support on this one. I suspect it will be ruled an installation issue, so you shouldn’t be charged for it (but you’ll have to give a credit card number when you call).

Sorry I don’t have any better resolutions.

Well, one thing to know is that the revision time estimates in PPT are not accurate, and they seem to become even less so the longer the file’s been in use. However, you are correct in that we tend to see more problems with files that have been around for multiple versions of PPT and have been used and revised extensively in different versions (and sometimes cross-platform, to boot).

You might consider running the Clone Me addin since the files are apparently still all working well. That can sometimes help dump some of the oddball things that seem to cause corruption in files. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…B;en-us;q193848%5B/url%5D

Yes, you’ll need Shyam Pillai’s “unflip” addin. It’s available from http://www.mvps.org/skp%5B/url%5D

Wow, I’m stumped. This isn’t something I’ve seen, nor can I find anything that seems relevant when searching through Google groups.

If you right-click one of the embedded charts or tables and go to Format, what percentages show on the size tab?

Anybody else got any ideas?

To create a relative link, simply put the video clip in the folder where the PPT file lives *before* inserting the clip into PPT.

Then when you burn the PPT file and video clip to CD, burn them to the root of the CD (don’t put them in a folder), and the link will work properly. It seems weird, but it does work.

You can add the link to a specific PPT slide by doing the following in Word:

Insert/Hyperlink. In the “link to file or URL,” browse to the PPT file and select it. Then in the “named location in file” box, put the slide number. Click OK.

In other versions of PPT, it’s easier to use filename#slide, so, for instance, your link might be C:Documents and SettingsComputerDesktopPowerPoint.ppt#7 to link to slide 7 in the PowerPoint.PPT file on your desktop. When I tested this just now by putting this link in the “link to file or URL” in Edit/Hyperlinks in Word 97, it worked fine. In fact, when I went in to edit the hyperlink to see what it was showing, it had moved the slide number down to the appropriate box automatically. Pretty cool.

I don’t know about any link limits in Word. If nobody on this board has a definitive answer, you might want to post on the Word board and see if anyone there knows. (But I’d suspect you’ll be fine with just 70-ish links.)

This is one I haven’t heard of, but I’d start with reinstalling the printer drivers as opposed to reinstalling Excel/PPT (which probably won’t help). Sometimes drivers become corrupt, so it’s worth a try and is less painful than some of the other solutions the techs are proposing!

Also, in Excel, go to Page Setup and on the chart tab, check the settings under printed chart size.

By the way, are your charts linked or embedded?