Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

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Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby MartinB » Fri May 20, 2011 7:20 pm

We have just got a new laptop for our sister church to use Zionworx on following our success at our church. Unfortunately, the new laptop has come with both Windows 7 and Office 2010. We are having major problems with getting powerpoint to work in this setup.

Sometimes when we try to run a presentation from Zionworx, it does not start. Other times it will start and move through the slides, but Zionworx does not update to match the screen (a major problem as we cannot see the screen fully from the projection desk). We are also having problems with getting slideshows to loop continuously. Also the whole responsiveness of zionworx/powerpoint seems very sluggish (particularly as we have no other software on the laptop!)

I have tried using the suggestion in another thread of turning on the "presenter view" but this does not seem to work consistently - sometimes when you try to start a slideshow, the presentation screen appears on the task bar and just flashes at you.

We have tried using existing presentations (.ppt) used on our other system (WinXP, PPT 2007) and creating new presentations in 2010, but with no obvious difference.

I have a few members of the other church who are keen to use this system for the services, but at present this is not feasible due to the unpredicatbility of Powerpoint and Zionworx. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to what the problem could be and any reliable fixes for the problem?

Many thanks,
Martin Bloomfield
Holy Trinity and St Wulstan, Heworth, York.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby brainier » Fri May 27, 2011 10:37 am

If you do not use PowerPoint from inside Zionworx does it work? Or is the problem with PowerPoint/Windows?
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby MartinB » Fri Jun 10, 2011 6:17 pm

Brian,

thanks for the reply. I believe that Powerpoint on its own (outside of zionworx) seems to work OK - I've certainly managed to use it on its own.

Martin.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby Downton Baptist » Tue Jun 28, 2011 11:24 am

I'm also having a horrible time with Powerpoint 2010 (on an XP machine). All was fine till the machine was upgraded to Office 2010 (from Office 2002). Additionally, displaying the powerpoint outside ZionworX (which we now more and more often revert to) works perfectly.

2 main problems:

1. When displaying the presention through ZionworX, what is on the display (secondary) screen and the control panel (primary) screen are different slides. Normally 2 slides different (primary being behind), but not always. Also, on some other occasions, as we index through the presentation, the control panel screen doesn't advance at all. Our solution is to provide the presenter with a remote (wireless) control to advance the presentation themselves.
2. If a presentation is large (memory wise), i.e. it has lots of photos, or a video, it can take tens of seconds to a couple of minutes to get the presentation on screen from pressing F4 (next playlist item). The PC is about 2 years old, and apart from ZIonworX, Online Bible & Office 2010, there is (deliberately) nothing else on it. As this gap is too long, for large presentations, we run directly from Powerpoint.

Any suggestions to help would be greatly received... Many thanks.

It is still a great package! Fortunately, the effects above (and the problem with Biblegateway) can all be hidden from the congregation so they don't see any impact. Just the 'driver' needs to work a bit harder than before.

With kind regards,

Mark
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby ChrisClark » Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:14 pm

Hi,

With regard to the speed of bringing up a presentation the time delay would be due to creating the thumbnails for the presentation when it is loaded from the playlist (though seconds and minutes does sound long - perhaps 2010 does this process differently from earlier versions). One way to speed the actual showing of the presentation would be to select the presentation on the powerpoint tab so the thumbnails are preloaded before pressing play. I'm not sure if then activating from the playlist though would try and generate the thumbnails again but hopefully not. This workaround doesn't help if you are moving from powerpoint to powerpoint in the playlist but should help going from songs to powerpoint.

We hope to address Office 2010 issues soon.

Thanks.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby Downton Baptist » Thu Jun 30, 2011 9:31 pm

Chris, I looked at this again today.

Setting up Powerpoint in advance before F4 to the playlist item still didn't seem to help. Watching the system, although the thumbnails were there to start with, as soon as I hit F4, it seemed to regenerate the thumbnails and repasted them on the left side of the screen.

Would adding more RAM help - the PC only has 1GB - or is the issue to create the thumbnails more quickly more a function of the speed of the PC CPU?

With kind regards,
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby ChrisClark » Thu Jun 30, 2011 9:48 pm

More RAM should help though. It is a reasonably cheap way of improving performance. 1GB is quite low for XP.

We can certainly change the logic for generating thumbnails to be smarter when activating from the playlist (F4) however if you are going through normal process flow then this would only help if the PPT has been preselected otherwise you would still have a timing issue with generating thumbnails.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby Downton Baptist » Fri Jul 01, 2011 5:58 pm

I've ordered more memory. I'll let you know what the improvement in performance is like once it is installed.

Thanks for the advice Chris.

With kind regards,
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby brainier » Fri Jul 01, 2011 6:05 pm

So I have installed the "new" computer is church, and where I got PowerPoint 2010 working with Zionworx 2.6.52 working fine at home on test it is playing up at church, so here I am on a Friday night and the results are this:

The first opened presentation works fine.
Any subsequent presentation does not move through the thumbnails
The thumbnails are recreated on starting the presentation in the playlist or when selecting the presentation in the drop down.
-->It would seem that the thumbnails are in a single folder and can only store one set - maybe a folder per presentation, so they only need creating once? And then removing on closing Zionworx or unloading the presentation. This might fix the step through issue too - but thats a guess.

So I have it working by having one presentation at a time open - unfortunatly at church we usually have a few each week.

PC is Windows 7 Ultimate, Office 2010, 3GB RAM and a SATA 5.4K disk. Saving thumbnails is slower than I would expect, you can watch it in Powerpoint - have ZW and PPT not overlapping. The speed might improve if ZW is not overwriting thumbnails, but creating new ones per presentation.

Brian
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby Downton Baptist » Fri Jul 01, 2011 6:28 pm

Sorry to post another PowerPoint 2010 problem, but as the team is working on resolving the other issues mentioned in earlier posts, I forgot one when I got involved in my first post on this, and thought they might like all the problems at once. :oops:

In our church, on Thursday the playlists are created for the services on the coming Sunday and saved on the desktop.

On Sunday, the PC is booted, ZionworX started and the appropriate playlist loaded.

Normally (i.e. not always), the .ppt entries in the playlist are greyed out with an error statement saying the not all playlist items could be found and loaded. So the operator of the day deletes the greyed entries and loads the .ppt files (also sitting on the desktop) into the playlist again.

Again, not a big issue, but a bit of an irritation.

This issue only started when we moved to Office 2010.

With kind regards,
Mark.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby pbc_avcontroller » Sat Jul 02, 2011 8:58 pm

Read with interest the thread relating to PowePoint 2010 and ZionWorx 2.6 ...

Look forward to hearing what the team come up with.

In my instance, if the set powerpoint has a background image then that is dispalyed and when pressing the advance slide button via ZW on the powerpoint tab nothing happens, then after a few more clicks the powerpoint advances to the next slide. If this slide only has straight text with no animations/ transitions then the text is displayed. The basic problem appears to be with ZW reading the animations/ transitions.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby Downton Baptist » Thu Jul 07, 2011 7:23 am

OK, I've now got 3Gb (from the 1Gb mentioned earlier). The gap from F4 to displaying on the screen only reduced by about 30%, so still a large delay with isn't great.

Other options that I see (on top of those mentioned by others earlier in this thread):
1. Generate (much) lower resolution thumbnails
2. Display the first slide as soon as the first thumbnail is generated, and let the remainder be generated in the background.
3. Have an option not to generate thumbnails at all (in my experience, >95% of presentations index from start to end and don't jump around significantly) - that is easy to control without reference to thumbnails and the end of a presentation can be signalled with a blank slide.

With kind regards,
Mark.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby Leigh Duffett » Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:39 am

Greetings readers

I have just upgraded to Office 2010 running on an XP machine.
No problems last week with Office 2003.
This week the slide animations would not work and although set for a timed advance to the next slide only the first slide was displayed.
I have not found any workaround but a guess running powerpoint outside of ZW would probably work.
Only problems to report. No solutions. :(

Thanks in anticipation for any help
Leigh
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby mark thompson » Mon Sep 19, 2011 7:11 pm

i too am having major problems with zionworx and powerpoint 2010:

Started when new laptop Windows 7, Office 2010.

  • Powerpoints with slide transitions do not work
  • the mini slide screen doesn't advance
  • i had last week 2 slides out of 25 not showing at all, zionworx just skipped the slide!, fortunately i check the powerpoints/zionworx the week before a conference :D

It is now getting to be unusable with powerpoint, and i run powerpoints outside of zionworx, which is not good for the occasional user as the whole idea of zionworx is to have one user interface.

It is a shame as across the circuit all Churches bar one use zionworx and that helps with a common pool of users, service lists can be emailed, etc, etc, but now we are having to look at some other software to enable us to have one user interface.

Any advice of when these issue will be fixed would help.
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Re: Major problems with Powerpoint 2010

Postby Christian » Mon Sep 19, 2011 9:23 pm

Hi Mark (and others),

I understand your frustration and I'm frustrated too that I haven't had chance to rework the code yet to support the changes that Microsoft made in PowerPoint 2010. It is totally possible to implement, it's just that there's quite a bit of rework to be done to make it happen, but once that's done it should be much more forwards-compatible with future versions of PowerPoint too.

Be assured that this is a top priority feature on the to-do list. I hope to get onto it as soon as I have some time. If you can bear with us then great, if not then I totally understand and I'm sorry!

Thanks,
Christian.
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