B
Barry
Hi everyone,
I've been reading this group for a while and there seem to be quite a
few knowlegeable people, so I'm hoping someone might have seen my
problem before and point me toward a solution. I've searched Google
for many hours but so far come up with nothing. Just FYI to start, I'm
using Word&Powerpoing 2000 SP3, Windows 2000 SR3, 2.4Ghz P4 with 2GB
RAM (just so you don't think I'm on a 486 or something).
I have several powerpoint presentations (well, hundreds) each in the
30-70 slide range, some with graphics, some just text, which are used
in training presentations. I proposed a while ago that we start
creating the printed student guides in Word by linking the slides into
Word documents, which gives us far more flexibility in the
presentation as well as much more opportunity to add content outside
of slides than the simple notes section in Powerpoint.
Anyway, seems like a good idea, right? We copy a slide in the Slide
Sorter view, go to Word and choose Edit->Paste Special, then Paste
Link. In principle it gives us workably small (3-6MB) Word documents
even with 50 slides; in practice it occasionally gives us 55MB
documents, with no rhyme or reason why. In fact, even when it doesn't
it's often unusably slow in Word.
OK, I've done seriously *tons* of investigation on this, and one
really odd thing I notice is that the links in Word (from Edit->Links)
all appear to have full, rather than relative, file paths, even though
we ensure that the word and powerpoint files source are always in the
same directory. This seems bizarre to me, and is one big part of the
problem.
If I create a linked document in D:\Courses, then copy the whole
folder to a network drive, and my co-worker opens them, it still looks
for a D:\Courses folder on his system (which he doesn't have), which
I'm guessing causes at least some of the slow downs.
Anwyay, I'm hoping for one of several solutions;
1) If someone can point out something obvious I'm doing wrong, I'll
love ya for it
2) If anyone can suggest how I can modify the linking process so it
uses relative rather than absolute (full path) links, that might help
a ton.
3) I'm a programmer (mostly Perl, but VBA isn't a stretch), so even if
someone can point me to a solution that requires some programming, I'm
certainly game to try it.
One last thing - I've seen a few messages talking about Powerpoint and
OLE that suggest that Office 2002 (or is that XP?) and/or Office 2003
may improve the situation a lot. Considering the development time we
put into these courses, upgrading Office is perfectly reasonable if it
will actually solve my problem - I'd buy the new version in a
heartbeat. My only reluctance is that we may shell out the money, and
end up with exactly the same problem.
Anyway, I appreciate it if you've made it through this posting, and
literally *any* help would be greatly appreciated at this point. There
is a pronounced forehead-shaped dent in the front of my monitor, and
I'm concerned it may be growing
Thanks,
Barry Hemphill [MS PPT LVP]
Concord Communications
(yeah, that L is for Least)
I've been reading this group for a while and there seem to be quite a
few knowlegeable people, so I'm hoping someone might have seen my
problem before and point me toward a solution. I've searched Google
for many hours but so far come up with nothing. Just FYI to start, I'm
using Word&Powerpoing 2000 SP3, Windows 2000 SR3, 2.4Ghz P4 with 2GB
RAM (just so you don't think I'm on a 486 or something).
I have several powerpoint presentations (well, hundreds) each in the
30-70 slide range, some with graphics, some just text, which are used
in training presentations. I proposed a while ago that we start
creating the printed student guides in Word by linking the slides into
Word documents, which gives us far more flexibility in the
presentation as well as much more opportunity to add content outside
of slides than the simple notes section in Powerpoint.
Anyway, seems like a good idea, right? We copy a slide in the Slide
Sorter view, go to Word and choose Edit->Paste Special, then Paste
Link. In principle it gives us workably small (3-6MB) Word documents
even with 50 slides; in practice it occasionally gives us 55MB
documents, with no rhyme or reason why. In fact, even when it doesn't
it's often unusably slow in Word.
OK, I've done seriously *tons* of investigation on this, and one
really odd thing I notice is that the links in Word (from Edit->Links)
all appear to have full, rather than relative, file paths, even though
we ensure that the word and powerpoint files source are always in the
same directory. This seems bizarre to me, and is one big part of the
problem.
If I create a linked document in D:\Courses, then copy the whole
folder to a network drive, and my co-worker opens them, it still looks
for a D:\Courses folder on his system (which he doesn't have), which
I'm guessing causes at least some of the slow downs.
Anwyay, I'm hoping for one of several solutions;
1) If someone can point out something obvious I'm doing wrong, I'll
love ya for it
2) If anyone can suggest how I can modify the linking process so it
uses relative rather than absolute (full path) links, that might help
a ton.
3) I'm a programmer (mostly Perl, but VBA isn't a stretch), so even if
someone can point me to a solution that requires some programming, I'm
certainly game to try it.
One last thing - I've seen a few messages talking about Powerpoint and
OLE that suggest that Office 2002 (or is that XP?) and/or Office 2003
may improve the situation a lot. Considering the development time we
put into these courses, upgrading Office is perfectly reasonable if it
will actually solve my problem - I'd buy the new version in a
heartbeat. My only reluctance is that we may shell out the money, and
end up with exactly the same problem.
Anyway, I appreciate it if you've made it through this posting, and
literally *any* help would be greatly appreciated at this point. There
is a pronounced forehead-shaped dent in the front of my monitor, and
I'm concerned it may be growing
Thanks,
Barry Hemphill [MS PPT LVP]
Concord Communications
(yeah, that L is for Least)