Last Sunday I again had the situation where one PowerPoint would appear to load. The thumbnails appeared in the Preview and the Live pane and the whole first slide on the Preview Output pane but the previous song remained on the output. The Thumbnail in the schedule also remained grey.



Two other PowerPoints worked perfectly.



All three had been loaded using the "add item: PowerPoint" button at the top of the Schedule pane.



I then tried adding the misbehaving one using the presentation database and it worked fine, it is just a bit of a nuisance adding it to the database then having to find it on the database.

Most likely powerpoint had crashed. Did you happen to check to see if PowerPoint was crashed and needed to be ended in task manager?

No,



I'll look carefully if it happens again.

You can check the windows event log and see if it was in a crashed state when this picture was taken. I did notice that the item in the schedule was grayed out, which means it was trying to built the thumbnails or maybe couldn't find the file.

I've not had a repeat occurrence yet but I have replicated exactly these symptoms be deliberately stopping PowerPoint in task manage.

I've not had a re-occurrence but I have replicated exactly these symptoms by deliberately stopping PowerPoint in task manager. Would it be a good idea to ask for a "PowerPoint has stopped working" warning when this happens?



Why PowerPoint should crash when using the "Add item" icon at the top and not crash when loading the same PowerPoint via the Presentation database is another matter.

For a long time PowerPoints have been working fine on our system and we have not had the issues some people have had.

We are running Win 10, Office 2016 and the latest version of EW. We did think that some out of date drivers were causing the problem and have installed software to keep those all up to date but the following still seems to happen - at random.

Over recent weeks we too have had issues with PowerPoint not going live.

We load the PP, thumbnails show everything is running as normal but on several occasions lately, when we click Go Live, the thumbnails show in the Live panel but nothing shows on screen.

The problem is that this happens in a service and we don't have time to check around and see what is happening - that PP needs to be on screen - now!

However, last week it happened again and we did notice that the PP icon at the bottom of the screen had lit up. We did not have a chance to investigate further. I told my operator to shut down EW and restart it. The PP then went live OK as did a subsequent PP.

On at least one occasion restarting EW did not work and we had to shut the PC down and restart it which is very messy and distracting on the main screen.

Normally you can kill PPT in the TaskManager to get it back on track instead of rebooting the entire computer.

Would be much better if EW did not do this to us at all. Anything you have to do in a live situation is frustrating for the operator and distracting for the audience.

Besides, not all operators can quickly assess the issue and respond to such a situation as they have no idea what is going on and most likely have no idea that PP has started when it should not have. As it has only happened randomly, and during a church service, you can't spend the time to troubleshoot.

How is EasyWorship supposed to fix this when Microsoft keeps changing or modifying the PPT rendering engine every other month? And with 4 different releases of PPT, some using different rendering engines what fixes one might break another. It's not easy trying to keep mup with a company as large as MicroSoft. EasyWorship is not the only presentation program that has been having problems with PPT the last few years either.



Add in the fact that there are thousands of different hardware configurations to deal with as well as at this point at least 6 different versions of Windows still supported that don't all act the same to updates.



Now ideally yes, they would be able to fix this with one update, but that just isn't feasible. They are fighting an uphill battle against a moving target that can move faster than they can. But the only way EW can decisively fix this permanently would be to remove PPT support altogether, and I doubt that most people would prefer that.

Today this issue happened again. Fortunately it happened before services began. We had a previously set up schedule - all good and everything working.

I loaded the preachers PP and decided to test it. Thumbnails on the LIVE panel -all OK BUT nothing on screen, The PP icon at the bottom of the screen had also lit up so I clicked on it and then Close Window which turned it off. What was worse, EW totally locked up. I could not save the schedule so just closed EW. I did get a message saying it could not find the schedule file - which had totally disappeared. That started a panic as we had then only 15 minutes to totally rebuild the schedule - which included edited songs which we had to try and get in the right sequence for the day.

I was not game enough to try reopening the PP so saved all slides as JPG's, dropped them onto the schedule and joined them as one slideshow (I love that function in EW). Problem with that is that you lose any animations and slide transitions if they are used. Todays PP did not have that issue.

Not sure I can trust using PP in EW unless this issue is fixed.