Can somebody troubleshoot a powerpoint issue?

Question

I have a mysterious problem with my slides that started about 2 weeks ago. I have several “standard” slides I use for a variety of presentations and all of a sudden the fonts changed! I went in and “fixed” the fonts and saved the presentation by adjusting the master slide. When i re-opened the document, the fonts defaulted to Times New Roman or Tahoma from Ariel. No matter what I do to the slides, I cannot change the font and make it stick. Not only that but the justification in text boxes changes to left from center. Any ideas as to what's happening?

I have a pretty good grasp of computer literacy, but this is just bugging the heck out of me and thought some outside eyes may recongize some little quirk i'm overlooking.

Thanks. They are just normal fonts - Arial is what it was saved in and it was only created about a month ago. We also have the latest/greatest version of ppt here at work and cannot install anything on our work computers without the helpdesk doing so. Must be a computer glitch or something? Thanks though.

Answer 1

Problem
You open a presentation in PowerPoint 2003 and it opens as Read-Only. You can't edit it or change it in any way, nor can you save it. You can only view, print or close the presentation.


This may also occur in PowerPoint 2002 after applying SP3 to Office 2002.


Cause
The presentation has one or more embedded TrueType fonts that don't have sufficient install privileges to allow editing. See Embedding fonts for a detailed explanation of what this means.


When you open a presentation like this, PowerPoint 2003 (through SP1) and PowerPoint 2002/SP3 open it read-only unless the embedded fonts are also installed on your computer. You can't edit it, you can't save it to a new name and you can't even substitute different fonts.


If you are using PPT 2003, choose Help, Check for Updates and apply any suggested service packs and updates.
Once Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later is installed, PowerPoint will ask if you want to replace the embedded but unavailable font. Let it do the replacement and you'll be able to save and edit the presentation.


If you don't have PPT 2003 SP2 or have PPT 2002, you'll need to figure out what fonts are embedded and install them if possible. Open the presentation and choose Format, Replace Fonts from the main menu bar. In the Replace Fonts dialog box, open the upper list-box to see what fonts the presentation needs.




A "TT-in-a-square" icon (like the Lydian font in this example) tells you that the font is embedded. This doesn't tell you which of the embedded fonts is causing the problem, but knowing which fonts are embedded may help.


Fonts with a TT or printer icon are TrueType or Type1(PostScript) fonts that are present on your system. Fonts with a "?" icon are needed by the presentation but aren't present. But since they're not embedded, they won't cause any problem.


Workaround
Here are the best suggestions we have for solving the problem:

If the embedded fonts are available, install them on your computer then try opening the presentation again.
Have the originator of the file save it again without fonts embedded and send it to you again.
If you have an earlier version of PowerPoint available, open the file there, use Format, Replace Fonts to substitute a different font for the embedded ones and resave the presentation. As mentioned above, this may not work in PowerPoint 2002, depending on your service pack level.
Open the PowerPoint file in Open Office (free), save it under a new name, then open the newly saved file in PowerPoint. (Thanks to Rodrigo on the PowerPoint Newsgroup for this one).