Bloody hell, that was scary. I just opened up Powerpoint on the Mac to go through my show for next Friday, and ALL the text was garbled. I mean nonsensical, complete gobbledigook. I opened up a previous version, same thing. WHAT???
This would mean no show. I was panicking. Then I looked at the text and realised it had done a Caesar shift one space to the right, so that 'Good Evening' became 'Hppe Fwfojoh'. Was it a virus? I opened up other files and exactly the same thing, so at least it wasn't just the version that I'd just done a week's editing on. The fact that the whole program was consistently weird was slightly heartening. So, like you do, I shut down Powerpoint and re-booted it. Massive and huge sigh of relief. All was well.
Well what on earth was all that about then?????
Relieved, Norfolk.
2 comments:
Trevor Middleton tweeted to say this:
Couple of thoughts:
1) Corrupt Office User database. Said db lives in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity and is prone to corruption and bloat. Answer to this one is to hold down the alt key (Mac) as you launch Outlook (or Entourage) and check/rebuild the database.
2) Corrupt .plist file: Powerpoint's .plist files are called com.microsoft.Powerpoint.plist and com.microsoft.Powerpoint.plist.lockfile
They live in ~/Library/Preferences If you have severe probs, quit the problem app, dump those files to the Desktop and restart the app. If all's well, you can dump the old .plist files in the Trash as Mac OS X will create more. You will however lose stored prefs. Quitting and restarting's the best place to start though!
Btw, Apple hides the ~/Library/ folder in Lion. The solution is to go to the Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder type (or copy and paste) the filepath: ~/Library/ and click Go.
Brilliant, thanks Trevor.
Just a quick footnote to my comment, since I tweeted as the points occurred to me:
In practice, I'd adopt the following diagnostic sequence:
1) Quit and restart, then check; if the problem recurs:
2) Quit, delete .plist files, restart and check; if the problem recurs:
3) Quit all Office apps, then check/rebuild the user database.
Database corruption is, however, much more likely to be an issue with Entourage/Outlook. Such applications are entirely dependent on embedded databases, which are subject to frequent changes, thereby increasing the chances of corruption and bloat.
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