Powerpoint 2013 unstable

Hello everyone! I think I found a solution to this problem.

I have this issue every time I download a powerpoint from my chemistry teacher's page. What I did was save the powerpoint as a "Powerpoint Picture Presentation" and I renamed it. Once you click save, a few seconds later, a little box should pop up saying that a copy of your presentation has been saved in wherever you saved it. If you do all your editing on the copy powerpoint, you should no longer have this problem. The only downside to this is that anything you wrote (using ink tools) outside of the actual powerpoint slide will be lost; however, everything written in each slide will be saved in that copy of the original powerpoint.

P.S: Sorry, I don't know if everyone can do this, but hope it helps!

olados

the same message ("We're sorry, something went wrong that might make PowerPoint unstable.  Please save your presentation and restart PowerPoint.") after Excel linked files crash. Fortunately my Power Point was not in the read-only mode so I just break links to Excel and save my presentation successfully.

Another question - I lost dozens refreshable charts and got static ones and this is great problem too - as you know you can't easily definite which link belongs to each of chart (like in the screenshot) and begins guessing

I believe I found the fix. I uninstalled Dropbox and the issue was resolved!

VERY nice detective work.  

I will see that this gets reported to MS.  Meanwhile, I'm afraid the only workaround is "Don't Do That".

Or use one of the available resizing add-ins that allows choosing custom sizes and resize to something that's 16:9 proportions but whose width doesn't exceed the 56" limit.

My own PPTools Resize add-in allows custom sizes like this.

The free demo will let you test this on small presentations (5 slides or so):

http://www.pptools.com/resize/

All,

I found a way to reproduce this error message at will.  I'm not saying this is the only cause, but it might give Microsoft some hints as to how to fix this issue.

If I start with a PowerPoint Poster that is use 4:3 ratio.  And the size of the poster is 48in Wide, 36in high. If I then convert the poster to 16:9 (Design | Slide Size), I will see the Read-only message when I try to save the file.  This will happen every time.

I even know why it happens.  The original poster size was 48in wide.  When I convert to 16:9, this increases the poster size to 64 in wide.  And PowerPoint allows this increase as you can see in Design | Slide Size | Custom Slide Size.  However, PowerPoint 2013 has a maximum width size of 56 in.

So if I try and manually change the width size above 56 in, I will get an error message.  But if I use the 4:3 to 16:9 conversion of PowerPoint, then I can exceed the 56 in maximum.  But this will cause PowerPoint to give you the Read-only message and not let you save it.

This is clearly a bug in PowerPoint as it should not let the user exceed the 56 in width maximum when converting to 16:9 ratio.  The software should re-scale to a smaller size to stay within the 56 in max defined by PowerPoint 2013.

I suspect there are other limits just like this one that we are exceeding and causing the error.  MS needs to identify them all and provide a fix.