Upgrading Pres 09 to Pres 13 loses information

Dec 30, 2013

Paul Barker
By Paul Barker

Hi all.  I am posting out of hope here!  I have many Pres 09 files and I have moved to Pres 13.  My problem is that many (more than half) of my presentations lose information when they are upgraded to Pres 13.  The 2 specific things that happen are that narrations can be duplicated and swfs disappear.

The narration issue is quite random, but a presentation of, eg, 30 slides will end up with just a few of the original narrations repeated many times throughout the presentation.  The others are simply gone.  The extra fun part is that the backup that is made when the presentation is upgraded to Pres 13 comes out the same when supposedly this is a simple backup copy.  I have downgraded to Pres 09 to try to retrieve the narrations from the backup and found they are duplicated in the same way.  I now have backups of my backups of my backups as this is just scary.

The swfs just aren't there after upgrade.  This may be all of them in a presentation or only some of them.  There is no pattern.  I am not able to open the Pres 09 copy and copy and paste the swfs over to the Pres 13 file.  This doesn't work.  Shame.  So, it means I have to identify what was there, find it and re-import it.  Hugely time consuming as I am not the original author of this material.

I have done all those things that are suggested for most issues - work off your local drive, don't have long file paths etc.  Same issues.

This is all material that worked fine in Pres 09 and I am simply upgrading these from Pres 09 to Pres 13.  How can it go so wrong when it is upgrading its own content!  There should be no mysteries or gotchas here.

If there are suggestions then that would be great.  A process that should take a few minutes per presentation has blown out to hours and that is not good.  As I said, upgrading Articulate to Articulate should not present problems!

Thanks for any suggestions.

Paul

6 Replies
Paul Barker
over 10 years ago01/01/14 at 5:14 pm (UTC)

Hi Leslie.  Thanks, I'll give this a try.  I have reinstalled a number of times, initially with the original Studio 13 version and now with the latest version.

I have had Studio 09 on this PC and have moved between 09 and 13 a few times.  I haven't ever attempted to have both running at the same time.

Unfortunately I need both Studio 09 and 13 as there are features in 09 that are ideal for classroom presentation (ie full screen display) and features of 13 that are ideal for online presentation (particularly the player).  Longer term, I will have one dedicated machine for 09 and another for 13.  Right now, I need to get these bugs ironed out so that I can move ahead.

The step in your instructions that asks you to 'uninstall Office' is pretty drastic.  I am not a fan of the 'blow it all away' method!  With other Presenter issues where an Office uninstall has been suggested (eg 'player files not found' when publishing) I found that doing an Office repair works and this avoids all the drama of losing Outlook, all the Word and PowerPoint customisations etc.  I would like to think that you could come up with a much less obtrusive solution.

I'll let you know how I go.

Thanks

Paul

Paul Barker
over 10 years ago01/06/14 at 5:59 pm (UTC)

Hi Leslie.  I'm finally back!  The Office uninstall went horribly wrong and mostly destroyed my system.  I have only today got things back and working.  Told you I wasn't a fan of drastic action!

Anyway, this did not solve the problem.  As soon as I open a Pres 09 presentation and it gets upgraded, the swfs disappear.  I am doing this off C:, but the swfs live on an external drive (E.  This is the way we have always done this with Pres 09 and it has always worked.

I am expecting you to now say, "there's your answer - you can't use an external drive", but this is totally unacceptable.  To expect people in corporate environments to have all of their development files and resources on one person's local drive is ridiculous.  I'm not using any network drives, but still, to be able to access and share resources, working off C: is not viable.

Any thoughts on a fix for me as the Pres 13 upgrade has generated a massive amount of work for me, and I have to point out again, Pres 13 is upgrading Pres 09 content so there are no surprises in there!

Thanks

Paul

Christine Hendrickson
over 10 years ago01/07/14 at 8:15 am (UTC)

Hi Paul,

Ouch! So sorry to hear that you had so much trouble with that - I certainly hope everything's running better on the system now.

Also - I'm afraid you're right - we would look directly to the fact that the SWF files are not on the C: drive. While I understand that it's difficult to make sure that you're always working from your local drive, this is the best way to ensure your projects work properly, even if it's inconvenient. 

Though it may take some additional time, it may save you some hassle down the road, or prevent problems like the one you're running into now. Keep in mind, however, that you're not required to keep the project files on your hard drive at all times. For example, say you're coordinating with someone and you both need access to the files - it's fine to store the project files on a network drive, just don't work with them off the network drive. 

Pull the files to your machine when you need to work with them. When you're done, you can move them back to the shared drive. 

Have you tried moving the SWF files to your hard drive? Does that improve things? 

If you still have trouble, I would recommend reaching out to our support team. They'll be able to take a closer look at what's happening with the project, the files and your system. If you do contact our support team, please share the case number here - this way myself and/or Leslie can follow along with the progress. 

Please let us know how it goes!

Thanks :)

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