An hour before I was supposed to keynote the Online Information conference in London, I found out that the copy of my presentation I’d FTP’ed to my site wasn’t working. So I gave the helpful media guy a thumbdrive with the latest version from my Mac. Same problem. When loaded on a Windows PC, the Mac version of my Powerpoints opens in an extreme read-only mode that does not allow it to be modified, saved, or saved-as because I embedded the fonts precisely in order to decrease the risk of incompatibility between Windows and Mac.

After some quick checking on the Web, we discovered that Mac doesn’t support embedded fonts in PowerPoint. So, I think what happened was: I developed the deck on Windows and embedded the fonts. I moved it to the Mac and did some more work on it. I saved it on the Mac. And this screwed it up for the PC.

Tag this: Aaaaarrrrggggghhhh!

(Having a read-only version made life harder for the media guy at the conference, but it all went well ultimately.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw