Recovering a corrupt presentation

PPTools
Shape Styles brings the power of styles to PowerPoint. Apply complex formatting with a single click
Merge Excel, CSV or tab-delimited data into PowerPoint presentations to create certificates, awards presentations, personalized presentations and more
FixLinks prevents broken links when you distribute PowerPoint presentations
Optimizer saves disk space and bandwidth, shrinks your PowerPoint presentations to the right size for email, screenshow or printing
PPT2HTML gives you full control of PowerPoint HTML output, helps meet Section 508 accessibility requirements
Prep4PDF preserves interactivity in PowerPoint presentations when you convert to PDF
Image Export converts PowerPoint slides to JPG, PNG, GIF, WMF and more

If you use a Mac, please check the Mac-specific suggestions here first:

How do I recover corrupt or unreadable PowerPoint presentations?

If you're getting messages like "PowerPoint cannot open the type of file represented by .ppt" when attempting to open a PPT file, it's likely that:

• Your file was password protected in PowerPoint 2002 (XP) but you're opening it in an earlier version of PowerPoint; earlier versions can't open password protected files and will give this scary error message when you try. Mac versions of PowerPoint through 2004 are also unable to open these presentations.
• Your presentation file has become corrupted

If it's a PPT XP file and you're opening it in an earlier version of PowerPoint, have the file's owner open it again in XP and save again without the password protection.

Otherwise, getting a corrupt presentation back seems to be pretty much a crapshoot. If you have an earlier version or a backup of the file, dig it up now.

If you are running on Windows Vista, you might be able to recover a previously saved version of the presentation by:

• Launch the Windows explorer and navigate to the folder where your presentation is located
• Right-Click on the presentation and chose "Restore previous versions" command.

(Thanks to John Langhans at Microsoft for that suggestion)

No backup?

Try some of the things listed below. But first MAKE a backup copy of your presentation and use it. Never try any of these recovery techniques on your only copy of a presentation.

Things to try:

1. If you run PowerPoint 2003, choose Help, About Microsoft PowerPoint from the main menu bar. If the About screen doesn't indicate that you have SP1 (Service Pack 1) or higher, you should update your copy of PowerPoint. Choose Help, Check For Updates. When the Office Downloads page opens in your browser, click "Check for Updates" and apply the recommended hotfixes and/or service packs.
2. If you run Windows XP and have installed SP1, see Files open as Read-Only after installing Windows XP SP1, Other file/path related problems
3. Open a blank presentation (You can apply the template used for the damaged file, if applicable. That might help cut down on reformatting.)
4. Insert, Slides from File
5. Try to insert slides individually if you're not able to insert the whole thing

Sometimes you can get some of your work back that way.

If your file corrupted during, say, a computer crash, you can sometimes locate a temporary version of the file in your TEMP directory. If so, you can try the aforementioned Insert, Slides From File and browse to that file. Or you can try renaming the extension to PPT and see if you can open it from within PowerPoint using File, Open. You could also do a search for *.TMP files on the off chance that it's not in your TEMP directory.

PowerPoint MVP Echo Swinford has some valuable suggestions for recovering from PowerPoint file corruption.

Troubleshooting damaged presentations refers to Windows 95 and PowerPoint 97 specifically but may have some useful suggestions.

If the presentation seems corrupted or on the verge of it, but you can still open it, download and use the CloneMe add-in from Microsoft (for PowerPoint 97 or 2000) or for PowerPoint 2000 and higher, try HTML "Round-tripping" to repair corruption

Many users have recovered damaged PPT presentations by opening them in Impress, the presentation program included with Sun's Star Office presentation package (US$70 in 2007) or .the free Open Office.

Or try Open Office, the free version of this same package. Note that it will ask if you want it to take over registration for the various Office file types (meaning that when you doubleclick a PPT file from then on, Open Office will launch instead of PowerPoint.) Unless this is what you want, watch out for it and just say "NO"

There's also Office Recovery, a set of commercial tools. Try this demo link also

If nothing else works, try opening the presentation in Word to see if you can at least recover the text:

• Start Word and choose File, Open
• Choose file type "Recover text from any document"
• Edit the file as needed

And to help prevent corrupted PowerPoint files in the future, Echo has these suggestions

Contents © 1995-2008 Stephen Rindsberg, Rindsberg Photography, Inc. and members of the MS PowerPoint MVP team. You may link to this page but any form of unauthorized reproduction of this page's contents is expressly forbidden.

content authoring & site maintenance by

Friday - The Automatic FAQ Maker