Phil's Projector & PPT woes

[Philip Ayres]

While we were away in London this week I had an email from one of the church elders asking me which of my team was doing an event this Saturday afternoon. None of them, I replied, since nobody told us it was on and asked for a projectionist. So I guess it had better be me. No problem thinks I, a few songs, all will be fine .....

Last night those organising the event emailed me and said they had a PPT presentation.... except it's been done in open office. Open Office is a great thing but features have a habit of breaking moving them between MS Office and back again. So let me have it early as a ppt and send me the OO files as well..... The files arrived and when I checked them I discovered that all the photos inside were missing: They'd somehow linked to the pictures rather than embeding them. Smaller presentation but one that breaks the moment you move it off the machine it was developed on leaving you with red crosses everywhere and error messages. That's not Phil fixable so I've had to throw it back to the owners with instructions on how to sort it out

www.robinbye.com/blog/2010/05/24/missing-images-replaced-by-links-in-powerpoint-presentations/

So kids, when developing ppt presentations for use on machines other than your own make sure the images are embedded.

[KnightBeat]

Wise words!

[Philip Ayres]

You sound like a man who has had this happen to him.

Kids: do not drag images into ppt. Always use the insert menu/right click & insert

[KnightBeat]

Yup. It happened twice when I organised a meeting a few weeks ago. I had asked everyone to email their slides a few days beforehand so that I could check and transfer them to the presentation machine. However, as often happens, people were preparing their talks at the last minute. I caught one when it was emailed the night before and asked them to resend it with the missing images. The second speaker arrived 5 minutes before the talk and hadn't checked his slides on another machine. Fortunately, he had the laptop that he'd used to create the talk and we just transferred the projector cable, but it was worrying for a few minutes.

[Philip Ayres]

I was sat there rebuilding a presentation as a wedding started once!