How to Repair Corrupt PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint presentations are often used as an alternative to white board and marker presentations. The use of PowerPoint presentations has significantly increased in the last couple of years moving from the boardroom to the lecture hall and now to personal events, such as parties. This article focuses on how to recover PowerPoint presentations.

Imagine planning a surprise birthday party for a friend. You create a beautiful PowerPoint presentation with all his childhood pictures and memorable moments. An hour before the party, you open the presentation and an error message appears indicating that the PPT file is corrupt. How will you save your friend’s surprise party?

PowerPoint (PPT) files, just like any other files in Windows, are at constant risk of corruption. Data corruption means that the file has been modified or some data lost and is therefore not able to open. There are many likely causes of corruption of these files leading to many possible solutions.

1. Use Safe Mode to Open PowerPoint

One of the major causes of data corruption in PowerPoint is poorly designed or installed add-ins, extensions or other customizations. These customizations could be interfering with PowerPoint’s normal processing or modify the file. To ascertain that this is the problem, you should open PowerPoint in safe mode because it closes all additions to PowerPoint.

• At thestartmenu, presswindows key+R.
• Typepowerpoint/safeand then press enter.
• PowerPoint will open in safe mode.
• Try to open the problematic PPT file.

If the file opens, that would mean that the problem is not in the file itself but in PowerPoint. Take some time to remove add-ins and extensions as you try to open the document until you find the corrupt one.

2. Copying the PPT File to a Different Location

Another common cause of corruption in PowerPoint is disk failure. Your hard disk could have a problem, such as missing sectors, making it corrupt some of the files saved in it. Transfer media such as flash drives are also very fragile and sometimes acquire complications that corrupt some of the files saved.

Copy the PPT file to a new storage media and try to open it again. If it opens successfully, you should troubleshoot the disk you had initially saved the file in.

3. Inserting Slides into a Blank New PPT File

This is one of the methods with the highest success rates. It works on the assumption that the file was modified but the data in it is still intact.

For PowerPoint 2003 and older versions:

1. Create a new blank PowerPoint file.
2. Clickinsertin theHometab then chooseslides from files.
3. Useslide finderto open the corrupt PPT file.
4. Click thekeep source formattingcheckbox.
5. Select theinsert alloption.
6. Save the new file in a new location.

For advanced PowerPoint versions

1. Open a new blank PPT file.
2. ClickNew slideinHomeand selectReuse slides.
3. Click on thekeep source formattingcheckbox.
4. Right click a slide and choose theinsert all slidesoption.
5. Save

If this method doesn’t work, it means that the level of corruption is intense and requires a strong solution.DataNumen PowerPoint Recoveryis the leading PowerPoint recovery tool and is recommended by data recovery experts. It is also easy to use and has the highest recovery success rates.