ppt 2004 Mac Slow opening ppt 2003 from XP

[gbl]

I create a presentation on the pc. It has inserted tiff's, jpegs, lots of slides (178). Opens on a dell xps Intel Core 2 duo with 2 Gigs Ram in under 20 seconds. Take it to the Mac running OSX 10.4, Dual 2GHz G5 , 1Gig ram, nothing else running and it takes around 5 minutes before I can edit a slide. This has ALWAYS been true. Every version of Ppt up to 2003 on pc, 2004 on mac that I've tried, runs like a dog on the mac. Though they run fine if you create your presentation on the mac. Will this ever be fixed? Are there any tips? While it's loading I get a few "converting metafile" though all the inserted graphics are just jpgs or tiffs, nothing pc specific. I have linked avi movies and I relink them on the Mac and they play fine. It doesn't help to save it on the mac under a new name. Even a 2 year old Dell laptop opens presentations faster than the Mac dual G5. Are there any tips for moving from pc to mac? I've got a person who wants to move to the mac but he has lots of presentations created on the pc that he would want to take with him
thanks

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

I create a presentation on the pc. It has inserted tiff's, jpegs, lots of
slides (178). Opens on a dell xps Intel Core 2 duo with 2 Gigs Ram in under 20
seconds. Take it to the Mac running OSX 10.4, Dual 2GHz G5 , 1Gig ram, nothing
else running and it takes around 5 minutes before I can edit a slide. This has
ALWAYS been true. Every version of Ppt up to 2003 on pc, 2004 on mac that I've
tried, runs like a dog on the mac. Though they run fine if you create your
presentation on the mac. Will this ever be fixed? Are there any tips? While
it's loading I get a few "converting metafile" though all the inserted
graphics are just jpgs or tiffs, nothing pc specific. I have linked avi movies
and I relink them on the Mac and they play fine. It doesn't help to save it on
the mac under a new name. Even a 2 year old Dell laptop opens presentations
faster than the Mac dual G5. Are there any tips for moving from pc to mac?
I've got a person who wants to move to the mac but he has lots of
presentations created on the pc that he would want to take with him
thanks

Hi,

If, after finally opening one of these, you use File > Save As and give it a
new name, does the new file also open slowly?

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I create a presentation on the pc. It has inserted tiff's, jpegs, lots of
slides (178).

I don't recall every having seen a converting metafile message when I've added
images usint Insert, Picture, From File.

However, if you use Insert Object, or copy/paste graphics from some programs,
or drag/drop images into PPT, that can create an OLE object, which includes a
metafile. That'd probably trigger the "converting" message and would also
likely slow down file opening on the Mac.

So ... how did you get those images into PPT?

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[gbl]

Thanks for taking the time and the tips. Doing a Save-as under Mac has no effect on open time. I didn't create the presentations so I don't know how the all the images were placed. I know that whenever I've helped it's via insert picture/from file, not via cut and paste but thanks. I'll do some experimenting with that, maybe I can write up a script that finds the slides with OLE objects and only those will have to be redone. There are embedded flash images that use the flash player and even if I delete those slides from the mac and save-as/open it still opens orders of magnitude slower. This is something I've been looking at with each new iteration of Powerpoint since the Windows 2000 days. I find it hard to believe there isn't more compatability between Mac and Pc yet. Word and excel files are completely transparent across architectures.

thanks for taking the time.

 

[gofigures]

Thanks for taking the time and the tips. Doing a Save-as under Mac has no effect on open time.

What if, on the PC (sorry I know this is not an elegant solution), you
select an image, cut (control-C) the picture and then File menu> Paste
Special, then select Picture (PNG e.g.). Try to first cut the
presentation down to a minimal number of "problem slides" to see if
this gains you any speed on the mac end.

 

[gbl]

Things I've tried with no effect on the mac open times.....

On PC I run a Macro that steps through every slide, every shape, every group and if it finds a shape with type msoEmbeddedOLEObject, msoLinkedOLEObject, msoOLEControlObject it deletes the slide from the presentation.

I save this presentation(after removing the vba module), still takes 4 to 5 minutes to complete opening on Mac and I still get 3 Converting Metafile messages.

Next thing I tried was macro that steps through every slide and ungroups everything. I saw somewhere that ungrouping fixes the metafile issue. This had no effect either.

Given that there are 160 slides in this presentation and I'm getting 3 Converting Metafile messages even if I could find the slides that had the problematic objects I doubt that would make much difference to the vast difference in open times. I suspect this is just a flaw in mac powerpoint that MS has no interest in fixing. It is not just this one presentation, this issue crops up with every presentation I've tried. They're all large (> 100 slides) but on virtually any pc they open in seconds, any Mac I've tried they open in 4 to 5 minutes.
So the last gasp before I give up until the next iteration of PPT on the mac from MS...any idea how I would determine what slides are generating the 3 "converting metafile" messages?

thanks again

 

[gofigures]

So the last gasp before I give up until the next iteration of PPT on the mac from MS...any idea how I would determine what slides are generating the 3 "converting metafile" messages?

I feel your pain!

This is what I do: duplicate the presentation. chop each presentation
in half (i.e. delete slides in sorter view), see if you get message
with each half. Repeat until offending slides are identified.

 

[Matt Centurión [MSFT]]

Are you using PPT 2004 or 2008? If you are using 2004, we have made some
speed improvements in 2008 which might help. If you can place your
presentation on a thumbdrive and try opening it at your closes Apple Store.
If it doesn¹t improve let us know and we¹ll try to other things.

Matt
MacOffice Testing
Microsoft

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

effect on open time.

What if, on the PC (sorry I know this is not an elegant solution), you
select an image, cut (control-C) the picture and then File menu> Paste
Special, then select Picture (PNG e.g.). Try to first cut the
presentation down to a minimal number of "problem slides" to see if
this gains you any speed on the mac end.

Another dodge is to ungroup the images on the PC. If they're OLE images,
ungrouping will toss out all the OLEaginous slime and leave you with just
graphics.

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[gbl]

Update...
   it seems to be the images. I wrote a script that steps through the slides, ungroups all the shapes and cuts the pictures , then does a paste.special as jpg. Taking this to the Mac cuts the 4-5 minute open time down to anywhere from 2 minutes to 2.5 minutes. The 3 converting metafile messages go away as well. So...the next thing I'll try is an Intel based Mac, Powerpoint 2008, and possibly XP running on Mac in Parallels box. This is really disappointing though. The presentation on the pc when I convert all the images via cut/paste to jpgs opens up in less than 15 seconds. On the mac the best I could get was 2 minutes. Thanks for all the insights and tips and taking the time.

 

[gbl]

Update...
New Testing rig
Macbook Pro 2GHz Intel Core Duo with 2G ram
Parallels , XP SP2 with 512MB virtual machine

In Powerpoint 2004 the presentation opens in about a minute.

Same Mac, Native Mac Powerpoint 2004 it takes around 5 Minutes. So I think I'll go with a virtual XP. All the AVI's play without having to relink and the flash movies work as well. It's sort of pathetic that a virtualized XP/Powerpoint works better than Mac native Powerpoint. Another deal killer for Mac native Powerpoint (not Microsoft's fault) is Apple seems to have removed any support for flash movies from Quicktime so there is no way to play a flash movie inside Mac Powerpoint. You can create a Mac.app from flash and link to that but it's not nearly as clean.