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Animation timings for multimedia are lost when you open a presentation in a different version of PowerPoint 2002

Article ID: 304568 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q304568

SYMPTOMS

When you open a presentation, the custom animation timings for media objects may all occur at the beginning of the presentation. This problem may occur when you do either of the following:

You open a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 that was created in an earlier version of PowerPoint.

-or-
You open a PowerPoint 2002 presentation in an earlier version of PowerPoint.

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This problem occurs because the media settings are reset to 0 (zero) seconds.

PowerPoint 2002 stores the animation timing settings for media objects differently from earlier versions of PowerPoint. As a result, custom settings revert to their default values when you move a presentation between PowerPoint 2002 and earlier versions of PowerPoint.

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WORKAROUND

If your target audience includes both PowerPoint 2002 users and users of earlier versions of PowerPoint, you must maintain two separate copies of your presentation.

If your target audience is PowerPoint 2002 users only, and you open a presentation that was created in an earlier version of PowerPoint, you must manually reset the timings for the affected media objects. To do this, follow these steps for each affected object:

Select the media object.
Right-click the media object, and then click Custom Animation on the shortcut menu.
In the Custom Animation task pane, click the arrow to display the menu for the animation effect, and then click Timing.
Adjust the Start and Delay values to restore the behavior that you want.
Click OK.

NOTE: These steps assume that the new animation effects are not disabled in PowerPoint 2002.

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STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was corrected in Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 1 (SP-1).

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MORE INFORMATION

This problem only occurs with objects that PowerPoint treats as media objects. You create these objects when you point to Movies and Sounds on the Insert menu, and then click one of the following commands: