You put a hard work on creating a business presentation. The day comes when you need to show the presentation to your boss, but you just can’t. The presentation is found corrupted, and all your hard work goes into vain. Now you must be thinking how to repair PowerPoint presentation. Well I can help you in this. Here in this blog post, you can find few easy manual tricks to repair PowerPoint presentation.

Data corruption is just like a nightmare for computer users. It may happen at any time due to numerous reasons, and result in data loss. Even sometimes permanent data loss can be also caused due to corruption. I’ve often seen PowerPoint users complaining “I cannot open my PowerPoint presentation”. The files created by PowerPoint, called PowerPoint program, are large in size and have a difficult file structure. Unluckily, the PowerPoint presentations are not immune to corruption and can become inaccessible at any time. Before discussing further, I would like to talk more about Microsoft PowerPoint and its different files types.

MS PowerPoint, a part of well-known Microsoft Office suite, is the staple tool that allows users to create slide-based presentations for multiple purposes. In these days, presentations are widely used in almost every sectors, i.e. educational, institutional as well as business and commercial sectors. A PowerPoint presentation file contains multiple slides which are arranged in a perfect order. MS PowerPoint allows users to add various objects to the presentation files, like: formatted text (colourful and monochrome), charts, different shapes, images, multimedia items (audio and video clips), etc. to make them more attractive.

MS PowerPoint saves the presentation files with PPT file extension. This file extension is saved by default in the older versions of MS PowerPoint. In the newer versions (2007 and later), presentation files are saved with PPTX file extension. A PPT file stores all the data of the presentation file in a single binary file, while a PPTX file is created by using the Open XML format that stores a presentation document as a collection of separate files in a compressed ZIP folder. In MS PowerPoint 2007 and later versions, users can save the presentation files with PPT extension.

MS Office users might also be interested in Repair Word Document by using 4 Easy Manual Tricks

I’ve already mentioned above that a PowerPoint presentation is prone to corruption due to its large size and a difficult file structure. Corruption can make your presentation file inaccessible and all your hard work may go to vain. There are many factors which cause corruption in PowerPoint presentation files, such as:

#1 Faulty application: A faulty application always generates corrupted or invalid output. If there are some issues or problems with your PowerPoint tool and you are using it for creating and modification of files, it may harm the files. The generated output (PowerPoint presentation) could be corrupted.

#2 Virus infection: Virus can affect the computer data and its files by overwriting or deleting some part of them. If a virus attacks on a PowerPoint presentation file or the folder in which the files are saved, the file(s) might be corrupted.

#3 Hard drive malfunction: If your system hard drive starts malfunctioning, the data stored in it may become inaccessible, including the PowerPoint presentation files.

#4 Unexpected system shutdown: If a system unexpectedly shuts down, this may be harmful for the data stored in the system. Besides this, if you were working on PowerPoint when the situation of sudden system shutdown took place, the PowerPoint files might be corrupted or become inaccessible.

#5 Human errors: Corruption which is done intentionally is included in human errors. It can be easily done by using an editor like Hex editor.

A corrupt PowerPoint presentation is always inaccessible, and throws error messages on your screen. Some of the most common error messages are given below:

• “PowerPoint cannot open the type of file represented by FileName.ppt.”
• “PowerPoint was unable to display some of the text, images, or objects on the slides in the file FileName.ppt.”
• “This is not a PowerPoint presentation.”
• “PowerPoint viewer cannot read C:path\FileName.ppt.” 
• “PowerPoint found a problem with content in FileName.pptx.”

Tips & Tricks to Repair PowerPoint Presentation

What things will come into your mind when you receive any of these errors? Certainly, you must be looking for a fix to repair PowerPoint files. Luckily, if you’ve backed up the PowerPoint presentations earlier, you have fair chances to get back your files. A backup file helps you restore the backed up copies of those files which have been corrupted or accidentally deleted or lost. If you have no valid backup file for restoration, you may try to recover the data from the corrupted PowerPoint presentations in the following ways:

Repair PowerPoint #1 – Open and Repair

This is one of the easiest and most recommended methods to repair corrupt PowerPoint file. It takes no more time and no more efforts, and fixes corruption in a couple of seconds (but only if possible). Microsoft provides a built-in repair feature in its Office components including PowerPoint. The steps required to Open and Repair PowerPoint file are shown below:

Step 1: First of all, launch Microsoft PowerPoint on your system.

Don’t open the corrupt PowerPoint file here.

Step 2: On the File menu, click Open.

Or, you may simply press Ctrl+O.

Step 3: In the Open window, browse the corrupt PowerPoint here.

Click the file once to select it. Now click the drop-down arrow shown next to Open.

Step 4: A list will be drop down here.

Click Open and Repair.

Just after that, the file will be repaired and opened. But unluckily the trick may fail if corruption is severe. In such situation, you can try another few other manual tricks given below.

Repair PowerPoint #2 – Insert Slides from corrupt file to new one

Step 1: Launch Microsoft PowerPoint on your system.

Don’t open the corrupt PowerPoint file here.

Step 2: Create a new presentation file and save it.

Step 3: On the Home tab, click the drop-down arrow next to New Slide.

Now at the bottom, click Reuse Slides….

Step 4: In the right hand side pane, a short Reuse Slides window will be launched.

Click the drop-down button next to Browse, and then select Browse File….

Step 5: Now locate the PowerPoint file whose slides you want to insert to a new file.

Once the file is selected, click Open.

Step 6: All the existing slides in the selected PowerPoint file will be listed here.

At the bottom of the Reuse Slides window, select the Keep source formatting check box.

Step 7: Right click the first slide in the Reuse Slides pane, and select Insert All Slides.

Step 8: Finally save the new presentation and republish it.

Note: The above steps can be followed in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 and 2010.

Repair PowerPoint #3 – Locating TMP or temporary file

Step 1: Click the Start button on taskbar or press it on keyboard. Now click Search.

Step 2: In the All or part of the file name box, type *.TMP.

Step 3: In the Look in list, click either Local Hard Drives or even My Computer.

Step 4: Now click on Search.

Step 5: After Windows finds your TMP files, click on Date Modified button at the top of the Search Results pane. If you do not see the button, you might have to scroll to the right.

Step 6: Look for a TMP file created around the time that you lost your PowerPoint file. Note the folder it is in.

Step 7: Open PowerPoint, and then go to the File menu and click Open button. 

Step 8: Click the arrow next to the Files of Type box at the bottom of that dialog box, and then click All Files.

Step 9: Navigate to the folder where the TMP file is located.

Step 10: Now click TMP file, and then click Open button. 

Repair PowerPoint #4 – Open file in different way or in different program

If the above techniques do not help you, you may try a different way or a different program to open the PowerPoint presentation.

Different way: Try to open the presentation file in this way:

1. Launch MS PowerPoint program on your system.
2. Go to File menu, click Open.
3. Double-click the PowerPoint presentation in Windows Explorer.
4. Drag the corrupt file to the PowerPoint program file or POWERPNT.EXE.
5. Now open the file by using one of the PowerPoint Viewers.

Different program: Try to open the presentation file in different program. You can try to open it in MS Word. If the file gets opened, you can recover at least the text part of the file. Other than MS Word, you can also try to open the file in OpenOffice Impress. OpenOffice Impress supports MS PowerPoint presentation files and can open them with ease.

MS Office users might also be interested in Few Easy Tips & Tricks to Repair Excel File Manually

If none of them work for you and you’re left with no relevant solution, this would be the right time to think about a professional recovery solution. There’re many software companies in the market which provide third-party utilities to repair PowerPoint presentations. SysInfoTools Software is one of them and highly popular in the field of data recovery and email management. The company provides PowerPoint PPT Recovery and PowerPoint PPTX Recovery tools for recovering data from corrupted PowerPoint presentations which are saved with PPT and PPTX extension.