PowerPoint not working? Microsoft update might be the problem…

I was onsite last week loading a client’s PowerPoint on to one of our show laptops, when I was suddenly confronted by a new and frightening error message I had never seen before. It went a little something like this:

“PowerPoint was unable to display some of the text, images, or objects as slides in the file (name) because they have become corrupt. Affected slides have been replaced by blank slides in the presentation and it is not possible to recover lost information. To ensure that the file can be opened in previous versions of PowerPoint, use the Save As command and save the file with the same name or a new name.”

Naturally, we were a little concerned. When clicking through the error, the presentation opened, but was missing almost all of the graphics and all the colors were wrong. We opened it on the client’s laptop, and it worked fine. We re-copied it onto a flash drive and loaded it again on ours with the same scary error message. We loaded it on to a secondary show laptop, and again, the message.  The presentation loaded fine on the client’s laptop, and on another personal (non-company) laptop.

I did a little research, and discovered that the day before Microsoft had pushed a PowerPoint “security update”, and reports were starting to trickle in of the mysterious error.  The update is called “Microsoft Windows Security Update for Powerpoint (KB2464588)”, and the problem can be reversed by uninstalling the update.

There is also a Hotfix that supposedly fixes the problem: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2543241

**IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do as the warning message says and “Save As”, the new file will be permanently missing the “corrupt” images.  If you do not save, the original PPT will load just fine once the update has been removed/repaired.

Inserting Special Characters- The Mac Equivalent of CharMap

*** UPDATE ***

This functionality has been hit or miss removed in Lion. Sometimes it works, sometimes it actually opens the .app (literally) as though you had selected “Show Package Contents” from the context menu, and you find yourself staring into the soul of CharacterPalette.app instead of launching the app itself. You now get a “Item “charmap” is used by Mac OS X and can’t be opened” message box.

There’s some good news, though.  It appears that as part of OSX Lion they’ve force-added “Special Characters…” to the Edit menu of every program.  At least all the programs I’ve used and remembered to check.  If that’s not fast enough for you, any myriad of programs can create shortcuts to menu items, including the built in “Keyboard Shortcuts” portion of the Preferences.  Just remember to spell it out exactly, including the elipses- Special Characters…

*****

It’s been many a year now since I started working almost exclusively with a Mac at the office, and there’s very few things left that I haven’t found equal or better ways of doing things compared to Windows.  There are still a few things lingering, though.

For example, I’ve yet to find a file/folder comparison application that even remotely stands up to Beyond Compare (I’m looking at you, ScooterSoft… let’s get this done!).  Additionally, I’ve often found accessing the “Special Characters” of fonts to be quite tedious.  By special characters, I mean things like €,∞, ©, and ü that I don’t use on a regular basis and aren’t on my keyboard.  Most applications have shortcuts to the “Characters Palette” , the Mac equivalent of “Character Map” on Windows, but it’s never in the same place or under the same menu.

The OSX Character Palette

On Windows, this is the same way, but years ago I learned that I could very quickly navigate to the Character Map by hitting Win-R and typing “charmap”.  Until now, I hadn’t found an easy shortcut on the Mac.  It requires just a little bit of setup, but then it’s just as fast as its Windows counterpart:

1. Open a Finder window and navigate to Macintosh HD/System/Library/Input Methods/

2. Drag CharacterPalette.app to your Home folder (or wherever you’d like), but hold down the Option and Command buttons while you do.  This will create an “alias” (like a Windows shortcut) of that file.

3. Done!

4. (Optional) Rename the alias to something handy.  Because of my long-standing Windows habits, I named mine “charmap”

Unlike the CharacterPalette.app file, which is a system file, the alias will be “seen” by the Finder , or by Spotlight.  Now all you have to do to quick-access the palette is to hit Cmd-Space and start typing “characterpalette” and Spotlight will suggest it most likely before you’ve finished typing the full word.  Or, like me, you can type your renamed alias.  All I have to do is hit Cmd-Space and type “charmap”, just like on Windows.

Hope this helps some folks out.  Leave comments if it does!

Happy GeekDaddy Day! BUG Labs tutorial for building your own web enabled baby monitor

by Brandt Krueger, Geek Dad since 2007

Happy Father’s Day, Geek Dads!  It’s your day, so why not spend it doing some hard core geeking?  I can currently think of no better example of GeedDaddyness than this tutorial from BUG Labs, which uses their modular device building system to help you create your own baby monitor.

The levels of geek cred on this project are many and varied.  Any project that contains these terms- “Open Source”, “Linux-Based”, “Web Enabled”, and “Motion Sensing” -has got it goin’ on!

Full feature on BUGLabs to come, but in the meantime be sure and poke around their site and see what else folks have built using the BUG.  There’s some very cool stuff!  www.buglabs.net