All about PowerPoint file corruption and recovery

PowerPoint is a presentation application provided by Microsoft as part of the MS office suite. The program offers a user (business executive, student, teachers, trainer) multiple features to build interactive slides which form a crucial part of the user's presentation. Through a PowerPoint presentation, a user can effectively and confidently communicate with his audience when he has collated related statistics, graphics, videos all at one place.

It's hard to imagine that one can lose access to the content of a PowerPoint presentation which he/she created after investing a great deal of efforts and time. A PowerPoint presentation is vulnerable to getting corrupted randomly and if it happens when a user has not maintained a backup, there is no other way, than opt for a PowerPoint recovery software.

If a user is not able to open and access the content from a PowerPoint file, it suggests that the file has got corrupted or damaged. Here is a list of symptoms:

• Errors suggesting the system has no memory
• System resources low, again indicated through errors
• Errors suggesting some invalid page faults have been observed or illegal instructions have been passed

As and when a PowerPoint file gets corrupted, a user can encounter various errors, few of them are given below for reference:

• PowerPoint can't read
• PowerPoint cannot open the file
• There was an error accessing...
• PowerPoint.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created

These errors indicate that the PowerPoint file has got corrupted. The reason behind corruption may include application malfunction, improper system shut down, OS is corrupted, power fluctuations, human errors and virus attacks.

Don't get disappointed if you have a corrupted PowerPoint file as the following troubleshooting mechanisms can be carried out in order to perform PowerPoint recovery:

Applicable when you cannot open the file

1.Drag the file to the PowerPoint program icon
2.Try and insert the slides of the affected presentation file in a new blank presentation
3.Try and access the content by moving the file to another computer
4.Use PowerPoint viewer to open the file

Applicable when you open the file

1.Try to use the Presentation as a template
2.Try to paste the slides to a new blank presentation
3.Attempt to save file as RTF

If above mentioned steps fail, and nothing seems to work, don't be disheartened as you still have a good amount of hope left in a ppt repair utility. These third-party tools have the capability to recover ppt files.