subject: Recovering from the "PowerPoint cannot open the type of file represented by .ppt" error [print this page] Recovering from the "PowerPoint cannot open the type of file represented by .ppt" error
You must have used PowerPoint to make presentations, be it as your college assignment or project, as a training tutorial, or as a corporate presentation. Therefore, you can easily understand how much effort is put in to create it. You need to be absolutely precise (and concise) to make the presentation so that the audience is able to gain something valuable out of it. That is why, it really pains to see if the presentation gets deleted or corrupt by some means. A presentation can get corrupt by various reasons such as virus infections, human errors, corrupt operating system, etc. if the presentation gets corrupt, then you should replace it with its updated backup. If you do not have the updated backup, then you must consider using a PowerPoint repair tool.
Consider a scenario wherein you are creating a PowerPoint presentation in MS Office 2003 for your college project. You add a slide to the presentation from another file and get the following error message:
"PowerPoint cannot open the type of file represented by .ppt"
The powerpoint presentation may stop working and will be inaccessible when you get the aforementioned error message.
Cause:
The cause of the error message is that the presentation may have become corrupt. You may not be able to access the file or may get junk characters.
Resolution:
To address this issue, you can take the following measure:
Open a blank presentation in PowerPoint.
In the "Insert" menu, select the "Slides from files" option.
Insert all slides of the corrupted file. Check if the presentation is now opening properly.
Another way out is that if the presentation became corrupt when PowerPoint or system crashed due to abrupt shutdown, then there will be a temporary version of the file in the TEMP directory. If it is there, then you can perform either of the two methods:
Perform the aforementioned steps with this temp file. OR
Change the extension of the temp file to .ppt and then open it.
However, if you still are unable to repair powerpoint file then you will have to get the file repaired using a PowerPoint recovery tool. Such tools employ complex algorithms to effectively scan the corrupted file. These are read-only tools that ensure safe recovery of the file.
