Red X on slide thumbnails in Master View

I'm running Windows 7 and Office 365 with all the latest updates applied. I have had this problem happen on more than one occasion.

According to PowerPoint, I've got the latest update and the version number is higher than the one you mentioned. Still had this Red X problem happen to me just last night. I'd been working with a fairly short file (< 20 slides) that has background images for my custom template, some imported images and charts built within PPT. After deleting a few text boxes on a few slides to return to the default template text box, all of my thumbnails on the left were each replaced by the Big Red X. The actual slides had the text and chart content, but all my template's default background images were gone with a note about being unable to find them. 

I did a "save as" to see what I could salvage from what I was looking at. The Red X is everywhere and none of the images appear when I open the file in PowerPoint 2010 that I just happened to have left on my system. There, I see a small red x in the upper left corner of the thumbnails and slides along with text that reads: 

"The image part with relationship ID rId14 was not found in the file." 

I have an earlier version of the file I can salvage and work with in PPT 2010 so I'm not totally screwed. That said, this is a HUGE problem for PowerPoint. The fact this happens as often as it does for so many users with a program that's all about presentations (i.e., graphics) is inexcusable. It makes PPT 2013 a liability rather than a tool I can count on.

If there's some way to provide copies of my files along with a full system profile, I'd be happy to share them with Microsoft if it meant being able to stomp out a major, MAJOR bug. I store my files on Dropbox, along with the images I import, but the background image is part of a custom template so it's not like PPT has to look elsewhere for it. This feels more like at some point PPT just choked and lost its ability to see the embedded image.

• A.

I am not sure if this helps but I had the exact same problem described above and simply saved the images to my local drive and then recreated the slides from my pictures folder. Initially I had simply cut and pasted them directly from an external source (screen clipping) without saving them to my hard drive. Now it works fine as long as I build the slide from images stored locally.

Good to hear, your welcome!

Apparently, this has fixed the problem for me, I just hope it lasts!

THANK YOU!