Playing Movies in Powerpoint 97

[SaintAugustine]

Augh! A Very Important Client and Close Personal Friend of the Boss just called me up to go over the video clips I had inserted into his Powerpoint presentation. They worked fine on my laptop - but now they won't play for him or for me on my desktop!!

He says when he tries to run it he gets an error message saying, "Cannot find file bla bla bla."

Looking near the "Save As" option I see there's a "Pack and Go" feature...Is this the key?

 

[SaintAugustine]

Answer - Pack and Go works and includes animation, but it saves your presentation as a Show - meaning no one can go in and edit the presentation. It sort of makes your presentation "read only."

The other wrinkle is that Powerpoint *links* to video files, it doesn't *embed* them. If you send a presentation with video, the presentation simply won't be able to link to the videos if it's not on your machine.

The solution is to put the movie clips into a special directory (like C:\video presentation), THEN link to them in Powerpoint, then zip the whole thing and send it to your client/friend/Santa Claus. The next trick is that he has to unzip the files into a directory named exactly to the one you put the movies in - so that powerpoint will always look in C:\video presentation for them, regardless of which computer the presentation is on.

I'm trying this now, but not having much success.

In closing, sending video clips in a presentation across computers is a headache. Don't do it.