I recently discovered a bug in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. If you insert a movie file into a PowerPoint presentation and you’re using the older .ppt file format then the link to the movie break when you close the file.  I’ve confirmed that this problem occurs with .wmv and .mov movie files and I assume it occurs with any other type of movie file. I’ve had a couple of clients encounter this bug. I reported this problem to Microsoft but it hasn’t been fixed as of the time of this writing. There is an easy solution to this problem. Use PowerPoint 2011′s native .pptx file format instead of the older .ppt file format.

Here’s what I did to fix the problem.

Open the .ppt PowerPoint file.

Go to the File menu and select Save As

In the Format section, select PowerPoint Presentation (.pptx)

Click the Save button. This will convert the presentation from .ppt format to the newer .pptx format

Go to the slide where you’d like to place a movie.

Go to the Insert menu and select Movie and then Movie From File

Navigate to the folder on your Mac which contains the movie file you want to insert into your presentation.

Select the movie file and click the Insert button.

Go to the File menu and select Save. The movie has now been imported to your presentation and will be saved within your PowerPoint file. You can check the size of your PowerPoint .pptx file to see that it has grown significantly now that the movie is saved inside it. When I was figuring out what the problem was I noticed that the file size of the .ppt file didn’t grow after I inserted the movie and saved the file. This told me that it wasn’t working properly. I also knew that I’d seen this feature work in other PowerPoint 2011 presentations. I then realized that the difference was that some files were .ppt files while others were .pptx files. That’s when I realized that this insert movie feature failed to work whenever I used the .ppt file format.

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You can use Apple’s infrared (IR) remote control to control slideshows in  PowePoint 2004, PowerPoint 2008 and PowerPoint 2011. Here are some instructions for getting this setup. PowerPoint 2008 and PowerPoint 2011 both include support for Apple’s remote. PowerPoint 2004 does not natively have this capability. Instead, you need to use one of the third party applications described in this other article. Personally, I’ve used the free iRed Lite.

First, here’s a little background. Starting in 2005, Apple started to ship remote controls with their iMac G5 computers. They then included it with MacBooks and MacBook Pros as well as the Mac mini. Apple’s intended users to use them to control FrontRow which lets user view movies (DVDs), photos and music. I think Apple must have realized that few people actually used the remote controls so they stopped including them with new Macs but they continue to sell the remotely separately for about $20. In 2009 they replaced the original white plastic remote and with a taller, thinner aluminum version. The remotes do have some uses beyond controlling FrontRow. Most commonly I see them used to control PowerPoint slideshows. PowerPoint 2004 does not support the Apple Remote but both PowerPoint 2008 and PowerPoint 2011 do support the remote. For a more thorough history of the Apple Remote check out this Wikipedia article. To learn about third-party products that allow the remote to control more applications and extend its capabilities in other ways check out this article.

Here are instructions on how to setup the Apple Remote to control PowerPoint 2008.

• Hold your remote control a few inches from your Mac.
• Simultaneously, press the Menu and Next (right-point arrow) buttons for 5-10 seconds.
• Open your PowerPoint presentation and click the Slideshow button to put it into slideshow mode.
• Press the Forward and Back buttons to move through the slideshow. Pressing the Pause/Play button will also advance to the next slide.

Apple's original white IR remote and the newer aluminum one.

If you ever want to unpair your Mac from a given remote you can go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences and then Security and click the Unpair button.

I should also mention that by default the IR receiver is on in all Macs. This means that other people could walk up to your Mac and pair a remote with it and start to control it. This isn’t the worst thing in the world but it could cause confusion. What really causes confusion is when there are multiple macs in the same room and one person suddenly starts to use one of Apple’s IR remotes and the remote starts to control all of the Macs simultaneously. I assume this only happens if the Macs have previously been paired with another Apple remote. In these situations it’s useful to know that the Security System Preference pane mentioned above lets you check a box to disable the IR receiver in your Mac.

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Have you received a file whose name ends with .docx or .xlsx and been unable to open it on your Mac? These files were created by either Word 2007 and Excel 2007 for Windows or Word 2008 and Excel 2008 for Mac. Thus, one way to open these files is using Office 2008. If you owned this then you wouldn’t have questions about how to open these files and you wouldn’t be reading this article. Here’s information about two other ways to open .docx and .xlsx files.

Option 1 – Use Microsoft’s free OpenXML Converter. It requires you to have an updated copy of Office 2004 as well as Mac OS X 10.4.3 or higher. This option is the focus of this article. See below for details.

Option 2 – Use Apple’s Pages application. It is part of iWork. I believe both Pages ’07 or newer is required.

To determine which version of Mac OS X you’re using please go to the Apple menu and select About This Mac. The version will be listed in the window that appears.

Go to your Applications folder to see if you have Microsoft Office 2004 installed. Look for the Microsoft Auto Update application as well. Run this application repeatedly until it indicates that all updates have been installed.

Finally, download the OpenXML Converter using this link. When you’re viewing this page you need to select which language version you want. For example, click on the link named English (.dmg) if you want the English version of this converter. After the disk image (.dmg) is downloaded on your Mac, you’ll need to open the disk image and then run the installer package (.pkg) file. Once you’ve finished installing this converter simply double-click on a file whose name ends in .docx, .xlsx or .pptx and the OpenXML converter will automatically be invoked in the background and the file will open in Word.

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