What To Do When You Receive A "powerpoint Can't Open The Type Of File" Error Message

By Author: chrisdave
Total Articles: 2
Comment this article

When you are working with PowerPoint, at times weird error messages put you in a cumbersome situation, especially when you fail to open the PowerPoint file. This situation may erupt when you try to open a PowerPoint presentation created by using any version in a version earlier than PowerPoint 2002.

When you attempt to open a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation that was created using Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 or using a later version of PowerPoint in an earlier version of PowerPoint, the file refuse to open expectedly. Additionally, you receive one of the following error message saying:

PowerPoint can't open the type of file represented by path/filename.

OR

PowerPoint can't read path/filename.

In certain situations, you may also find the file is damaged. Hence, it is required that you find the actual cause of this behavior before you seek workaround for this trouble.

Cause of this error message

PowerPoint sometimes behaves this way when you attempt to open password-protected PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint 2003, or PowerPoint 2002 presentations in any earlier version of PowerPoint ...
... or in the PowerPoint Viewer.

The first version of PowerPoint was PowerPoint 2002 for Microsoft Windows that first provides the option to implement password protection for presentations. Earlier versions of PowerPoint do not have this option hence they are unable to open any password-protected presentations.

Workaround to open PowerPoint presentation

To work around this issue, following are the steps that work appropriately for the version of PowerPoint that you want to run:

For PowerPoint 2007

1.In PowerPoint 2007, open the presentation, type the password, and then click OK.
2.Click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Prepare, and then click Encrypt Document.
3.In the Encrypt Document dialog box, delete all the text in the Password box, and then click OK.

For PowerPoint 2003 or PowerPoint 2002

1.In PowerPoint 2003 or PowerPoint 2002, open the presentation, type the password, and then click OK.
2.On the Tools menu, click Options.
3.On the Security tab, delete all the text in the Password to open box, and then click OK.

This behavior of PowerPoint not just restricts users to open the file but also leads to damaged file. If the presentation you want to open is not created or edited using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 or PowerPoint 2002, your presentation is likely to be damaged. In this case, this solution will not work out and you will have to take help of a professional PowerPoint file repair tool like Kernel for PowerPoint Repair Software.

Using this PowerPoint file repair tool you will be able to recover text, formatting, animations, sound effects, images, OLE objects, fields including hyperlinks from a corrupt or damaged presentation file. It is compatible with all versions of PowerPoint files. No matter for what reason the file get corrupted, Kernel for PowerPoint Repair Software can successfully deal with inaccessible presentation files. You can get a free version of the software for trial. This will give you a fair idea of it working.

Author of this article is a MS Office expert, who has good knowledge of rectifying MS Office related issues, such as repair PowerPoint file, inaccessibility to open PowerPoint file, improve MS Office performance etc. Her articles describe the way to perform repair PowerPoint file.

For more info please contact :- http://www.powerpointfilerepair.net/