Mac to PC Animations

[Libby]

I've just completed my first presentation built in PowerPoint from the Microsoft Office X package I purchased in May of 2002. The PPS plays great on my Mac, but when I play it as a PPS on a PC, all of my animations are messed up. When played correctly, the images appear & then dissapear on a click & then the next one automatically fades in. (I have as many as 10 of these transitions on one slide.) On the PC, everything is there but the images don't disappear, they just keep flying in, stacking up on top of each other, without clicking. The sound file plays fine throughout. I'm assuming it's a version problem with PowerPoint, because the PC was running an older version. So I started to rebuild the whole thing in Powerpoint from Office 98 for Mac, but then I couldn't insert the mpeg sound file. I hate to go to a lot more work & find out other problems...a thread i found a similiar discussion from Nifty Nic back on December 1 '03, but appears the issue was never resolved... I intend to distribute this presentaion on CD to multiple users & platforms. Will I run across memory issues because i have so many images & animations? (I didn't like how my text when typed in PowerPoint, so i set it in Illustrator & then saved as jpeg chunks in photoshop in RGB 100dpi.) File size is about 12.5 MGS. I mention this because when I tried to play the show on my old version in office '98 in Mac OS9, it kept quitting til i added more Ram. What a pain this is... I used PowerPoint because i thought it would be more universal. Anybody out there have suggestions? thanks in advance.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Libby,

In regard to the images that don't disappear, please be sure that all
updates are installed on both the Mac side when you save your presentation
and on the PC side when the presentation is played. If either side is not
fully up to date there's a higher likelihood of trouble. Even if both sides
are up to date, there still can be incompatibility. The Mac version when
updated should be the 10.1.5 version. Windows users need to go to the Office
for Windows update site and let the checker automatically look for and
install updates.

Once you have completed your presentation, try using the Save As PowerPoint
Package a try. This method puts your media objects and presentation together
into a folder with links to the media. This may help with your file size
problems and may make it easier to distribute on a cross-platform CD.

PowerPoint 2001 and earlier on the Mac has its default preferred RAM setting
too low for most things. As you discovered you need to jack it up
considerably to avoid freezes.

There are many other postings in this newsgroup with hints on how to work
with multimedia files and how to deal with QuickTime files. For
cross-platform use you can try saving your audio files as .wav (QuickTime
Pro can do this for you).