2010 ppt theme not publishing properly

Aug 06, 2018

I've run into a problem I'm wondering if anyone else has had. I couldn't find anything while searching the discussions.

Someone gave me a PowerPoint presentation they wanted to add narration to using our Studio 13 version of Presenter. I tried doing a couple test slides with recordings and published the presentation. When I did so, my sound recordings played back fine, but all of the slides were a blank white.

I did some experimentation and determined that the cause seemed to be that an old theme called Urban was used from the 2010 version of PowerPoint. My best guess is that the old template is utilizing the old color palette and other related information from the 2010 version, and while the information is retained inside the presentation itself, it's not within the current version of PowerPoint itself, even when the template is imported, so it ends up as missing data when Articulate makes the conversion?

Has anyone run into this problem and found a solution? 

Thanks much!

7 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Aaron,

I have seen anything similar with a theme called Urban, but I'm curious if you were able to change the theme and then see your content again? 

Although you're using Presenter '13, what version of Powerpoint are you running now? 2010 is one of the supported versions, so you could use that to confirm if the theme is the issue. 

If you wanted to share the Presenter package here with us, we can also give it a test and see how it behaves in a few different environments. 

Aaron Sotala

I'm running PowerPoint 2016 on a Windows 10 machine.

Yes, if I changed the theme to any of those built into Ppt 2016, I was able to see the content in the published form. If I changed back to the imported 2010 theme, everything disappeared again.

I've been handed plenty of old PowerPoint files before, so I'm not sure why this would be the first time I've run into this issue.

I'm attaching the package file.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks, Aaron for checking that and sharing the file.

I tested this in Studio '13 with Powerpoint 2016 and Studio 360 with powerpoint 2016 to see if they were the same, and in Studio '13 I saw the same as you, but in Studio 360 the slides normally appeared as you can see here. 

It seems that Studio '13 does not want to use that PPT2010 theme if you're in PPT 2016. You mentioned having other older files, and those behaving normally - were they also created in PPT 2010 as a theme?

Was the Presenter course initially created in 2010 as well, or only the theme that was shared with you? 

Aaron Sotala

Hi Ashley,

I’m not certain what version of PowerPoint the presentation file was created in. It was done by an outside designer, given over to the instructor, who then handed it to me. I can try finding out.

Now that you ask, to be honest I’d have to go back, document and test lectures from over the years to see exactly what was used for them in terms of what version of PowerPoint they used, what themes, and if they still publish as they did originally. I simply was surprised that I’d never run into this problem before, considering any number of instructors update and reuse lectures created in earlier versions of PowerPoint. It’s possible I’ve never actually had one with a theme this old and simply didn’t realize it.

I’m not sure if this information will help or not, but I decided to download the Urban theme from the Microsoft website to our computer where I saved it as a theme in our copy of PowerPoint 2016. I then created an entirely new presentation and applied the Urban theme (2010 theme) to it. The Studio ’13 software did the same thing, it failed to show anything on the slides. Changing the theme to one of those that came with PowerPoint 2016 again resulted in all the slide content showing up properly. So it’s definitely the theme not playing while with Studio ’13, as opposed to that particular file.

The only thing that stood out for me was that when I’m in the Urban theme, my default color palette and default font sets revert to those used in the 2010 version of PowerPoint, which are no longer a part of the new 2016 version. Attempting to manually copy and paste specific elements of the presentation’s master slides into a new file, then manually reapply the colors and fonts seems to eliminate the problem when publishing using Studio ‘13, but that’s basically rebuilding the theme from scratch. Any attempt I made to manually apply a custom color set of the old color scheme onto the existing presentation failed.

thanks,
Aaron

Alyssa Gomez

Hey Aaron,

Thanks so much for that additional information. It sounds like you're moving forward in the new file with the manually applied theme, is that right? Is everything working correctly in that new file?

We'll continue to do some digging into the Urban theme to see if we can recreate a similar issue on our end. If we uncover anything new, we'll let you know!

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.