General stability of PowerPoint 2002

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cris
  • Start date Start date
C

Cris

Hello,

I'm a university professor who uses PowerPoint
extensively. I don't use animation features much, but I do
collaborate with other people regarding PPT content. Often
I will get feedback from other several other teachers in
parallel on the material, in the form of changes to a
presentation done to the actual files.

One of the latest features of PPT is the ability to merge
changes. That's a great addition for someone like me as
it's hard to keep track of what has changed.
Unfortunately, when I have tried to use this for
presentations with more than just 5 or so changes, the
behavior of PPT is very unpredictable. Accepting changes
results in text being inserted in strange places, and
eventually PPT hangs (taking 99% of CPU) and I have to
kill it with the X in windows or the task manager. I'm
running on XP.

The hanging has also occurred not infrequently, during
normal editing of files I have created from scratch, or
with files I have edited from previous semesters created
with PPT 2000. I have installed the latest patches using
office update, tried editing files on the local hard
drives (as opposed to Novell servers as is my general
case), etc. Nothing seems to help. The only thing I did
was set the auto-recover save frequency to every minute.
Once bitten twice shy (actually I was bitten more than
once before I changed this). It seems that's the only
thing I *can* do at this point.

My installation is fresh (less than a month old). My XP
was installed at the time of the outbreak of the SoBig and
Blaster worms, and I was very careful to get the patches.
Everything that I can update was updated before I even
started using my machine for any PPT work.

My question is this: Is PPT 2002 just very unstable with
respect to these "advanced" features or in general? PPT
2000 was very stable. I feel that I'm being a MS beta
tester (I can't tell you how many error reports have been
sent to MS so far!)

I'd like to hear from somebody that PPT 2002 *can* be
stable. Else I'm going to revert to the 2000 version of
Office. We're already at the end of 2003 and the 2002
products don't appear to be stable! Other professors in my
department are heading that way, and I've warned them
against it. Are there any profs out there who are happy
with PPT 2002?
 
Hi Cris,

Personally, I couldn't go back to 2000 because it wont do the things we need
to do. Particularly moving 3d objects for simulations. We also use it a lot
to link to visualisation programs (ARCGIS), and those things tend to really
bring out the best and worst in a program.

As for stability, I have seen various issues crop up. But I don't use the
reviewing feature much. If you have 2 presentations that will cause this
problem, I could maybe arrange to look at them. We would need to see if the
problem is consistent on other systems, and then we can maybe raise it
higher.

When I say consistent on other systems, there is nothing worse than the car
with the noise that wont do it again when you take it to the mechanic
<grin>.

--
Regards,

Glen Millar
Microsoft PPT MVP
http://www.powerpointworkbench.com/
Please tell us your ppt version, and get back to us here
 
Hi Glen,

Thanks for the feedback -- given that it causes problems
for the secretaries, under Win 2000 as well as XP, I'm
pretty sure that it's not just my machine. I have seen a
few other postings about PPT going 100% cpu, etc.

I gave up on the advanced features and will wait for it
to be more stable. What is inconsistent is that MS has
released 2003 version of Office before 2002 (XP) is
stable. Anyway... that's life in software.

Cris
 
Cris, you might try the stuff here:

http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00034.htm

I wonder if the printer driver thing might be affecting performance in
your office? Video drivers and hardware acceleration are also two
biggies that affect PPT performance.

FWIW, I've got 2002 here on my WinXP machine, and it's been very stable.
 
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