A reader who wishes to remain nameless wrote, in something of a lather, about the difficulty he was having moving a Keynote presentation into PowerPoint. Specifically:
Why does Keynote 2 include the option to export my presentation to PowerPoint if it doesn’t work? I imported a PowerPoint presentation into Keynote 2 and it looked fine. I added a few things to it and then tried to export it as a PowerPoint file so a colleague who’s tied to PowerPoint could use it. Halfway through the export I see a message reading “An error occurred while exporting your document to PowerPoint.” What’s going on?
Bad bullets, most likely. This is a problem a few folks have encountered and are discussing in the Apple Discussion Forums. It’s like this:
When running Keynote in Tiger and importing a PowerPoint presentation, some bullets may be imported that flummox Tiger and Keynote. When you then try to export a presentation that includes these bullets, you get the error you’ve described.
The somewhat tedious workaround is to select a Master slide that contains bullets, select the bullet area of the slide, click the Inspector button, click the Text tab, and then click the Bullets & Numbering tab. If nothing appears in the bullets pop-up menu, you may have some problem bullets. Select something from the pop-up menu (Text Bullets, for example) and move on to the next Master slide that contains bullets. Then try to export.
If that doesn’t work, it’s possible that your individual slides are tainted. Run through them as well, performing the same operation I just described.
If even that doesn’t work, create a new blank presentation, copy a Master slide from the old presentation into the new one and try to export the presentation. If it works, go on to the next Master slide. If there’s a problem exporting the presentation, use the technique described above to replace the bullets on the Master slide that broke the export. When you’ve ensured that all the Master slides work, import the rest of your slides.
Oh, and feel free to curse freely afterwards.