Powerpoint problem

[ice_walking_838]

Im really bad with macs and would be grateful of your help. I recently bought a mac book. I have microsoft office on it so i have powerpoint. But when i download my university powerpoints....(made on windows) they wont open with my powerpoint or anything else i have, So i download tonic point a powerpoint viewer which is great because i can look at them now. However i desperatly need to print these as it makes my studying at uni easier but tonic point wont let me do this. Im aware there is a microsofrt 98 powerpoint dowload for free however this is not compatible with recent versions of mac os x. Could u suggest anything simple to me? Or if its complex explain it in detail? I dont know any one else with macs that can help me
Pleeeasse help

[John A]

Hello,

I think you're experiencing these problems because the PowerPoint application that created them is newer than the current version available for Mac. I think it's possible to export them so they're comptaible with older versions of PowerPoint, but as you're downloading them, this doesn't really seem to be an option.

Why don't you try NeoOffice (basically an open-source clone of MS Office)? It can import just about anything, and it's free, although they strongly encourage donations.

If that doesn't work, you can always use Parallels Workstation to emulate Windows, although that will kind of set you back a little bit if you don't have a spare copy of Windows XP.

Hope this helps

[ice_walking_838]

would u use keynote?

[John A]

would u use keynote?

I would definitely recommend trying NeoOffice first. It's free, so if it doesn't work, you haven't lost anything.

Keynotes will probably work, although this paragraph Macworld wrote may be of some concern:
http://www.macworld.com/2003/04/reviews/keynote1/

After seeing what Keynote could accomplish, we were eager to jazz up our existing PowerPoint presentations. But the results of our attempts to import PowerPoint files were inconsistent. Although a few presentations made the jump cleanly, many suffered from glitches that required considerable repair work, including shifted graphics on slides and changed text color.

So although Keynotes will probably work, OpenOffice (NeoOffice) will probably do a much better job of importing, from what I've read, and it won't cost you anything.