Mac Forum / Applications / PowerPoint / February 2005

[This is unrelated to the widely reported problems with movie frame rates.]

After copying all files from my old PowerBook to my new PowerBook, my
(Office 2004) PowerPoint slides will no longer find, load, play, or open
existing movies.

I think this is because PPT has remembered an alias to the .mov file, and
the FileID has definitely changed.  However, both the full path and the local
path (relative to the .ppt slides file) are the same.  (I even named the new
machine and hard drive the same as the old machine and hard drive.)

The specific symptoms are:

* Launch the .ppt file
* PPT says "Searching for movie data in 'mumble.mov' file".
* PPT says "The movie file 'mumble.mov' cannot be found. Without this file,
the movie cannot play properly", and offers "Cancel" and "Search" options.
* If you select "Cancel", the movie appears to be converted to a picture,
and you never get an option to treat it as a movie again.
* If you select "Search", a file dialog is brought up, but navigating to the
appropriate directory containing the .mov file, all .mov files are grayed
out, and cannot be selected.  (Actually, all files are grayed out, from what
I've seen, though you can navigate through all folders.)
* At this point the only option is to "Cancel" out of the Search/File
dialog, and then the movie appears to be converted to a picture, as in the
other path.

So you end up in a situation where all movies in all talks are broken, and
cannot be repaired.  I *can* go back in and re-insert all these movies
manually, but it's going to take forever.

Any hope for fixing this?  Don't suppose the problem is addressed in Service
Pack 1?