I seem to hear this as a challenge a few times from clients, so I though I should outline my process when I come up against PowerPoint challenges in Connect Meeting Rooms.

EMERGENCY!? – If you are reading this because you are in a Connect Meeting Room with the hot, insistent breath of your manager just behind your shoulders and 500 impatient participants wondering why the company logo is now lime green, go straight to Option #7…

…otherwise take your time…

There are a few options that you can use to share PowerPoint (PPT or PPTX) in a Connect Meeting Room.  These conversions and options will not always work with every PowerPoint file, PowerPoint is a pretty complex tool and Microsoft is not terribly forthcoming with the inner workings of their tool so as I understand it, the Adobe folks have to reverse engineer the effects, transitions, animations and the like.  The process is not perfect, but there are a few things you might want to try to mitigate the issues in the conversion and sharing process.

This post is intended to give you the very best chance of success, but understand that sometimes you will need to resort to the lowest common denominator.

There are a number of methods that you can use to share a PowerPoint in a Connect Meeting Room, they are listed here in (my) order of ease-of-use, conversion quality and participant experience.

Option #1 – Drag-and-drop the PowerPoint into the Connect Meeting Room Share Pod.
Easy, just drag the PowerPoint file into the Share Pod (ensure that you have the Connect Meeting Add-in Installed, otherwise the browser may try to just open the file on it’s own).  When you drag the PowerPoint file into the Share Pod it will load the PowerPoint into Connect and then convert it.

Easy to do but this only loads the PowerPoint into the specific Meeting Room, so another presenter in another Meeting Room would have to load the PowerPoint again.

Option #2 – Load the PowerPoint into the ‘Content’ section of the Connect Account.
In this case, you navigate to the ‘Content’ section on your Connect Account and you use the ‘New Content’ button to load the PowerPoint file.  This again load and convert the PowerPoint file into Connect.

This is a little more effort than a ‘drag-and-drop’, but ultimately the PowerPoint file is more readily available to other users in your account, particularly if you load it into the ‘Shared Content’ section, it can be loaded into any Meeting Room in a matter of a few seconds without conversion or uploading time.

Made for sharing!

Option #3 – Save the as an earlier version of PowerPoint.
This is really an option for files saved as PPTX (PowerPoint 2007 and later).  In some cases you may see a challenge with the advanced features in a PPTX file.  One option worth considering is to re-save the PPTX file as a PPT (PowerPoint 2003 or earlier), you will see this option when you save the file.

In my experience, re-saving the file as an earlier version can often solve conversion issues when you load the content into Connect.

Option #4 – Simplify your fonts.
When you load a PowerPoint file into Connect, the Connect server will try to match the font in the PowerPoint file with the fonts on the Connect server.  If you have a relatively obscure or privately owned font, Connect will substitute another more common font into the PowerPoint (such as Arial).

The substitution of the more traditionally available (legally available?) font might very well compromise the original formatting in your presentation.  If you change the font in the presentation to a more readily available font prior to upload then your formatting should be preserved during the upload and conversion process into Connect.

Option #5 – Take a serious look at your images.
Sometimes you might see that an image in your presentation has seemingly disappeared, or you might see that the slide with the image take a long time to load when you change slides.  In almost all of the cases I have seen, this relates to a jpeg (or other) image just needs a little ‘cleaning’.

The issue with the image might be in the initial conversion before it was added to the PowerPoint slide, it might be the size or any number of issues, but the solution might be pretty simple:

1. Copy the image in PowerPoint
2. Open the image in a simple image editing program (such as ‘Preview’ on a Mac)
3. Re-save the image as a jpeg
4. Delete the original image from the PowerPoint slide, paste the new image
5. Another option to ‘clean’ the image is to re-capture the image using a screen capture program, copy it, delete the original and paste the screen-captured image back into the slide

The issue we are trying to solve is either the size of the image (I have seen 10mb images of a logo on a slide, unnecessarily huge).  Otherwise we are trying to solve the format of the image, sometimes, the original conversion was just not acceptable and friendly to Connect, so just ‘clean’ it with a re-save and in 99% of the cases it will now work with Connect.

You could spend days trying to work out what went wrong or send 30 seconds fixing it.  BTW, I really never know ‘what went wrong’ with the creation of the original image, just how you  might want to fix it.

Option #6 – Convert the PowerPoint to a PDF file
You would use this option if you had tried the options above and the conversions were still not acceptable.  Save the PowerPoint file as a PDF and load the PDF into Connect.  The compromise here is that you will lose the animations and transitions in the slides, but the PDF file is typically a very consistent reproduction of the original PowerPoint formatting.

The trick to sharing this PowerPoint as a PDF in Connect is to use the ‘Fit Page’ icon (Figure 1) to scale the slides and then the ‘Previous Page’ and ‘Next Page’ icons (Figure 1) to navigate through the slide deck.  This will allow you to go from slide-to-slide more easily.

Figure 1