Inserted objects not working on other PPT2010 computers

Question

I'll apologize in advance for my long winded question;

We manage a conference that has up to 12 speakers in a 90 min slot (5 days, 8 rooms, over 1600 presentations). To avoid having to swap out their laptops every time there is a speaker change, we acquire the presentations in advance and insert them as objects on a master slide. When one speaker is finished he exits his show and the next speaker has to just click the picture of his slide and away he goes. At least that is the way it worked in previous versions of PPT. We have been doing presentation management for over 10 years in this manner.

We do the object insertion in advance using placeholder PPTX's with the speaker's name as over 60% of the presentations are received or edited on-site; we overwrite the placeholder with the received PPT but preserve the file name so as to not break the links.

This year we upgraded all of our show computers to Office 2010 and that is where the trouble started. We create the main slide with the inserted objects on it on the root of C:\ on a management computer and then move via memory stick or network to the same location on the remote show computer so as to preserve the link path. This year we noted that a slide show with inserted objects would function 100% on the computer on which it was built, but none of the links would work when it was moved; even after updating the links both automatically when the file was opened and manually. In some cases one of the objects would work but when you exited back to the object slide, no other links would fire.

Even more strangely when the PPT2010 object file was opened in PPT2007 everything worked fine, except for the loss of features not backward compatible. It worked on a 2003 box too!

Our work around was to add a hyperlink to each inserted object linking it to the placeholder in the same folder. In the past the act of inserting the object wrote that hyperlink. The extra work on 1600 linked objects was not appreciated!

We have pored through the security settings, trust center, DEP, configuration etc etc without finding a solution. I have tried using Pack&Go, saving in different formats etc without any progress. We do many similiar conferences throughout the year and presentation management is a core service offering on most of them.

I could understand lack of compatibility between older versions, but you'd expect 2010 content to run on a different 2010 box!

I would appreciate any insight.

Answer 1

Just a thought, Lou -- SP1 for Office 2010 was released yesterday, and it listed this as a fixed issue:

You save a file that contains hyperlinks to different UNC or DFS shares which have a common parent.  The hyperlinks are converted to relative paths when the files is saved, which breaks the links.

I realize that's not exactly your scenario, but I wonder if it's related at all and if SP1 will take care of it.

Might be worth a shot, anyway. It's an easy enough thing to test! Get SP1 here:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460049

(Oh, and drink a margarita or three for me, k?!)

Answer 2

Hi Lou,

>> I am not sure what the copy/paste/link is in reference to, the object links were created one at a time using the OLE dialog.

Ah, Insert Object?  OK.  That amounts to about the same thing, just gives you a little less choice as to what appears. 

What kind of action setting are you applying though?  You could be telling PPT to activate the OLE object or telling it to link to a second presentation.  I'd suggest the latter.

With a bit more work you could export an image of the first slide in a presentation (again replacing a dummy linked image) and not have all the OLE stuff.

IAC, have a good time in Mejico, bebe unas tequilas para mi y [HIC!} come back after the hangover wears off. ;-)

That'll be fine.  You might want to copy and save the conversation so far off to a text file so you can pop it into a new question with edits if need be, in case the current conversation's a nuisance to find. 

I'd rather keep it here, at least for starters, so others can chime in with ideas and/or benefit from whatever we find out.  But there are no rules against direct communication if it turns out to be necessary.  Keep in mind that you're dealing with volunteers here.

Answer 3

Thank you Steve for that very detailed reply! I am not sure what the copy/paste/link is in reference to, the object links were created one at a time using the OLE dialog. The way you describe the links working is exactly how we run it.

The reason we link to the inserted object is so the placeholder adopts the first slide of the presentation when overwritten by the actual content. Nothing breeds confidence in a speaker than seeing an image of his slide as the link. We did have to create the action setting hyperlink however to achieve that functionality.

Yes, the slide package did work after not working on another computer when it was brought back to the originating computer it was built on.

I will DL your FixLinks application and try it out on both units and paste the results, (thank you for offering that appy!) however I am leaving for Mexico tomorrow for 2 weeks so I'll hafta put further research on this project on hold for awhile.

Can we pick this up again in late July once I run those tests?

Are you open to and is it within the rules of this forum that we communicate directly?

Thank again for your input.

Lou

Answer 4

I'd suggest using links created a bit differently.

Instead of copy/paste/link, create an action setting, Hyperlink to, Other presentation and pick your presentation.

When you click the link, the other presentation will open, leaving your original "menu" presentation open invisibly "behind" it. When the other presentation ends or the user ESCs out, your menu is there waiting to launch the next presentation.

This is a much simpler form of linking than OLE links, and generally more reliable and more easily fixable via a bit of vba or other code.

Other than the method of creating the links, your workflow would be pretty much the same ... link to dummy presentations, then copy in the real ones as you receive them.

As to the way you're doing it now ... yep, it certainly SHOULD work.

After creating and saving one of these presentations, I assume (but figure it's better to ask) that it still works when you re-open on the same PC.  Is that correct?  There was a bug in PPT 2007 (that may still be in 2010) that caused links with bookmarks and some links on network drives to be trashed when the presentation was saved/closed/reopened.  Can we eliminate that particular scenario?

I'd be curious to see the difference between what PPT makes of the files on the first box (after you've created them, while they're still working) and after moving them to another box (and having them fail).

Would you mind installing my FixLinks demo on each of the PCs and running links reports on small sample presentations, then copy/pasting the results back here?  You might find the link report tool useful for other things as well; costs nothing, never times out.

http://www.pptools.com/fixlinks/