Presentations are automatically swapping images from different slides, moving images to different slides, deleting duplicating and altering the size of images after I save, close and reload.

At least I'm glad to not be alone with this bewilderment. My presentation was fine for several opening and closings on my computer, but then I tried to save it to a thumb drive - but it didn't work (just kept spinning "waiting for program to respond" so I gave up on that. However, since then, the presentation has been all messed up on my computer.

>> Potential solution: Take a hammer to my laptop and buy a surface.

I'd check the forums that deal with Surfaces (Surfi?) here on Answers and elsewhere.

I have friends who LOVE their Surfaces, others who've had nothing but trouble with them (though I hope that's a thing of the past).

They're probably fine now, but given their history of problems, I'd personally approach them with caution.

Yes but it is permanently messed up. When I copy the slides over they are still all over the place. Instead of copying over the template I'm just remaking it all together. Essential the PowerPoint is corrupt possibly from an element of photo that was added so I'm using new photos rather than ones from the corrupt PowerPoint file

Will post if it happens again to the new presentation I made from scratch.

My new suggestion is to still back up the PowerPoint as you'd always do but also back it up as a pdf. The animations won't work on a pdf but at least it saves some of your work.

I doubt that anyone here can say for sure what's happening, but it sounds very much as though your presentation file has somehow become corrupted.

Give this a try:

Start a new presentation based on the same template or theme that your problem presentation is based on.

Open the problem presentation also.

For each slide in the problem presentation:

• Create a new slide in the new presentation, based on the same layout in the problem presentation.
• Click onto the slide in the problem presentation, press CTRL+A then CTRL+C
• Click onto the matching new slide in the new presentation and press CTRL+V

Try that for the first ten or twenty slides then save the new presentation. Restart PPT and check to see if it's behaving properly. If so, continue with the same process for the rest of the slides.

You'll probably have to do some re-formatting, but better that that re-make the whole presentation.

Just to be clear, did you copy the *slides* from the original presentation into the new one or did you select all the *content* of each slide and copy it onto a new slide in the new presentation?

If the slides are corrupted, copying them will most likely bring the problem along with them.

Copying just the *content* can sometimes leave the bad stuff behind.