.: Powerpoint can’t open .ppt..

while the same file opened on OpenOffice Impress®. Amazed ?? Read on…

My roomie had a big problem one night and he sought my help. The problem was rather simple. He had a .ppt file uploaded on his filebox on the VT server and he wanted to download the same and rip off a few slides to complete the presentation that he was currently working on. But poor old Microsoft Powerpoint would not open the file. It kept popping a “cannot read from file” error. I tried everything from trying to rename the file, rename the extension, opening in different versions of Powerpoint but to now avail. With all hopes lost, I decided to try one last thing before I hit the sack. Emailed the file to my address, rebooted my system into Fedora and tried the one last gasp attempt at opening it in OpenOffice. Voila ! It worked. I was able to read the file and view its contents. Then all I had to do was to save it again, and send it back to my roomie. Now he was able to open it in Powerpoint. I am no whiz when it comes to how these things work internally, but I can find ways out of situations. If someone ever has this problem with any other MS-Office suite applications, try opening them in OpenOffice. It might just work.

And if any of you geeks know why it opened in Impress while it failed in Powerpoint, enlighten me.