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Merging Presentations From Multiple PowerPoint Versions? Watch Out For These Traps

This article reprinted with permission from All 'Bout Computers.

Recently, a visitor to my site emailed me to ask what he and his employees could do to prepare for a day of presentations they were hosting. However, this request had a slight twist to it. The visitor was well familiar with how to host the presentations. Instead, they wanted to know what issues might bite them during the presentations. Why ask this? Because the machines for the conference were all going to be PCs running PowerPoint 2002, but the machines which will have created the presentations will be both Macs and PCs, running anything from PowerPoint 97 to PowerPoint 2002.

At first, one would think there are not many issues to watch out for. After all, PowerPoint 2002 opens and runs presentations from all previous versions. In general, presentations can be run cross platform as well. However, after only a few minutes, several concerns came to mind.

If you can get the presentations ahead of time, it will help you out immensely. You can run through the presentations and make sure that you were sent all of the correct files (especially for sounds and movies which are linked, not imbedded.) You can also verify that the graphics have come in correctly, not flipped upside down or sideways. In some situations, PPT 2002 has been known to have these problems with jpegs and other graphics when a presentation created in 2000 is opened in 2002.

Next thing to check is what fonts were used in creating the presentation files. If the senders did not use pre-specified fonts, it is likely that they used non-standard ones, so you may need to do some font replacement. (Again, a good reason to check them out ahead of time.)

I suggest saving each presentation to the hard drive and pulling each presentation up and running through it before the session (whether or not you get them ahead). These two steps (running from the hard drive and pre-loading) will also allow the machine to bring all of the included items into memory and prevent machine slowdowns due to loading.

How are you pulling up each presentation? Are you going to build a giant menu and select presentations from that, or are you just setting them up on a session by session basis? If you are able to set up menus, it might be worth setting them up on a room by room basis.

The fact that some of the presentations were done on Macs should not matter, except for an increased likelihood that they are using fonts you don't have. Oh, and you should make sure that all of the Mac presentations with videos are able to be viewed on the PC, as not all video CODECS translate correctly between the two systems.

Let's see, what else? Oh, check that the backgrounds are all visible on your display screens and that the fonts, etc. are big enough to be seen from the entire room. If they aren't, you may need to either do some adjusting or do a last minute workaround.

Are each of the presenters going to run their own shows, or is your event staff going to run the shows? If your event staff is going to run the presentation, I recommend that you print out an index of the slides for each presentation, so that the staff members can know what to do/where to go in case the presenters decide to skip around or over material.

The same visitor posted to the PowerPoint newsgroup. Several other issues were raised there. If you want to check these out, check out this URL:http://snipurl.com/atk  Be sure to add to the comments if you think we have forgotten anything!