Presentations play a central role at conferences and in business in general. There are hundreds of thousands of presentations made every day, and in the world of conferences and meetings, more than 90% are based on PowerPoint slides. Even though Office 365 introduced continuous updates and bug fixes to PowerPoint over a decade ago, there are still many technical problems that occur when people give their presentations.
In this blog post we’ll present five types of common presentation problems and our recommended solutions for dealing with them. We believe these five problem types cover 99% of all the presentation-related technical problems that you see at conferences and live events today.
Use these links to quickly jump to your particular problem:
If none of these fit your particular case, please contact us. We’re curious to hear your experience and to see if we can help you out.
Of the common presentation problems that we at Preseria have observed at conferences, by far the most frequent issue is PowerPoint videos that won’t start playing. There are four main reasons why this might happen:
If you’ve inserted a video into a slide without embedding it, PowerPoint will create a link to the absolute path of the video on your hard drive. This feature allows you to create light-weight PowerPoints that don’t take up much storage, and is ideal if you have lots of PowerPoints referencing the same large-sized video, but will cause a problem when you try to play your PowerPoint on another computer.
If you have access to the source file, you should remove the link and embedded it instead. You can do that by following these steps:
If PowerPoint can’t find the file at the absolute path, it will look inside the containing folder of the PowerPoint file and see if it can find a file with the same filename there. If it does, it will load and play it instead.
In general, I’d recommend avoiding using PowerPoint’s “Insert online video” feature if you can. You are dependent on a working Internet connection to play the video and you risk it being suddenly removed or taken down. Even if you are online, you might have to wait a few seconds for the video to load before it starts playing.
This is not really a solution to an online video disappearing, but more of a prevention technique. If you own the online video (it’s published by you), but have lost the source file, you can try to grab the source file from the streaming service by using youtube-dl. I won’t go into steps on how to install and use this software, but you should be able to follow the installation instructions for your system. Keep in mind that if you don’t own the video, but still decide to download and embed it in your presentation, you are probably infringing on someone’s copyright.
If you’ve ever had to deal with multimedia-rich PowerPoint presentations that were created with an old version of Office, or created on a Mac, but played back on a Windows machine (or the other way around), you’ve probably seen the “Codec unavailable”, “Media unavailable” or “Cannot play media” error message. This error basically says that PowerPoint recognizes that there’s a video clip on a particular slide, but it doesn’t have the necessary third-party software installed on your machine to play it.
PowerPoints built in “Optimize Media Compatibility” feature can often fix videos that won’t play. Follow these steps and then check that the video plays without issues.
If you encounter notable loss in audio or video quality, stuttering or visual artifacts that aren’t supposed to be there, you can try the alternate solution below.
If optimizing media compatibility didn’t work, or the quality of the optimized video was bad, you can try to convert the video to another format manually. Our favorite tool for this task is a free and open-source tool called HandBrake. Instructions on how to convert nearly any format to MP4 (H.264 video and AAC audio), a format that PowerPoint supports on all platforms, are found at the bottom of this post.
This setting is not a problem or error in itself, but the “On Click” label is misleading and often misunderstood by presenters. When inserting videos into a slide in PowerPoint, you will have the options to set it to start “Automatically”, “In Click Sequence” or “On Click” / “When Clicked On”. In later versions of Office, Microsoft identified the ambiguous label “On Click” (which could be interpreted as a mouse click or a next click on a “clicker”) and changed it to “When Clicked On”. This clarification is a big improvement, but we still see presenters accidentally jumping over their video and onto their next slide, when their real intention was to start the current slide’s video.
Because presenters at conferences and events, in most cases, only have access to a presentation remote, a so-called “clicker” with “Next” and “Previous” buttons, we recommend starting videos “Automatically” or “In Click Sequence”. The setting “On Click” / “When Clicked On” requires the presenter to move over to the laptop, move the mouse cursor over the video and click the left mouse button to play the video. Not very seamless and easy to forget when you’re presenting in front of a live audience. The only case we see where “On Click” / “When Clicked On” is useful is if you absolutely need to present multiple videos, repeatedly, on a single slide in a non-linear fashion.
To change the way a video starts, follow these steps:
I honestly haven’t experienced that having a cluttered “TEMP” folder with lots of files will affect PowerPoint in any negative way, but several forums and blogs mentions it being a possible reason for why videos in PowerPoint won’t start. I believe lots of files in a TEMP folder could potentially fill up your hard drive and cause the computer to slow down because of low disk space. That could certainly have an impact on PowerPoint’s ability to load and play a file. Regardless, if nothing else works, it’s worth a try to perform a cleanup of the TEMP folder.
Follow these steps to perform a disk clean up of your system disk (where Windows and Office are installed)
