Copy-and-pasted directlyfrom AdobeReader

TIFF file drag-and-drop

JPEG file drag-and-drop

TIF file drag-and-drop

PNG file drag-and-drop

GIF file drag-and-drop Drag-and-droppedimage from Safari

Drag-and-droppedimage from FireFox

If you are preparing a PowerPoint file on MacOS X, note that forWindows PowerPoint compatibility of included images: 1. Do not drag-and-drop images from Safari. 2. Do not copy-and-paste images directly from other applications.Microsoft, fix the damn incompatibility between your PowerPoint apps on MacIntosh and/or Windows.

Images in orange rectangles fail to

display in Windows PowerPoint.

The image area displays:

Quicktime(TM) and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Workaround: Save image data on clipboard to a file using Preview, and drag-and-drop it from Finder into PowerPoint. Note: All file drag-and-drops are

from Finder.

The Problem:

PowerPoint files created on Mac using PowerPoint 2004 may contain images that cannot be displayed on Windows using PowerPoint (2001, 2007) with the following message displayed for the image:

"Quicktime(TM) and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture"Installing QuickTime on Windows would not work, and you don't have time to do that anyway if your presentation has started.

Analysis:

This happens when image data are directly pasted into PowerPoint slides on a Mac via clipboard from other applications such as Grab.app, Preview.app, AdobeReader.app etc.

Somehow, data copied directory into PowerPoint slide via pasteboard (clipboard) is tagged with unnessary flag to point to QuickTime TIFF decompressor.

Drag-and-dropping an image from Safari Version 2.0.4 (419.3) into PowerPoint page, causes the same error condition. Safari probably uses clipboard for drag-and-dropping image data.

On the other hand, FireFox is different. Drag-and-dropping an image from FireFox (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3) into PowerPoint page produces a file that displays correctly on Windows as well.FireFox probably drag-and-drops the path to the temporary file somewhere for the image. Notice that the image data are not placed on the clipboard in this case.

Whatever it is, this should be a totally unncessary bug, since TIFF or TIF files saved via Preview.app are imported correctly into Mac PowerPoint, and displayed correctly on Windows PowerPoint. Mac PowerPoint can interpret and display the TIFF data from clipboard just fine. It doesn't have to tag it as QuickTime data. Just save it in whatever format your Windows PowerPoint can read. Microsoft, fix it. It's not an Apple problem. The bug is in either of your PowerPoint applications, and fix both versions for robustness. I mean how hard is it to interpret TIFF data. Still having this problem with Windows PowerPoint 2007 is inexecusable. I am beginning to suspect that Microsoft may want to keep it this way intentionally to limit compatibility at 95% to frustrate users, or nobody cares as long as the Office suite is selling regardless.

Avoiding the problem - a Workaround:

First creat a file from pasteboard data using Preview.app (File > New From Clipboard, and save image to file in a desired format), and then drag the image file into into PowerPoint from Finder (or use menu: Insert > Image > From File ...).