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Support

 i have being trying to get help with a problem we have with EW but we are not getting a response


do you have a support team working?


i received a ticket number for the problem but that is all.



after trying to use EW for 5 years, different version, we are coming to the end, it is a real problem when using Powerpoint

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They do, but it seems to be hit or miss getting a response these days. Why don't you tell us what your issues are with PowerPoint as well as a detailed list of your hardware specs, what version of PowerPoint, and what release and build of Windows as well as EW and we can try to assist you here. Most of us have little to no issues with PowerPoint.


Also see the following PowerPoint Troubleshooting to see if anything there helps.


https://support.easyworship.com/support/solutions/articles/24000008151-general-powerpoint-troubleshooting

Thanks so much for your help with this, I still have heard nothing back from them, price gone up but support gone down :(

My problem is:


We have had ongoing issues with EW and PowerPoint. We thought that our laptop might be too old so we have just upgraded to a new computer, Win 10 pro I7 v10, 32GB memory with 4GB Nivida Graphics card. So it should work fine. However we still have the same problem as we had on the laptop. We also have latest version of MSOffice

After loading a PP file into EW and then clicking to go live it often tries to open up PP outside of EW and then locks up. If we close the opened PP file outside EW, then EW will not work until we restart it. At other times when we go live from a song to the PP file, the song continues to show but the PP does not - it shows it as live in EW but it does not project it, it continues to project the last song. Sometimes when moving from song to PP it just locks up. PP and all the other programs work fine outside of EW.

We have upgraded all our software and this is a clean new install but we have the same problem as on the old laptop. EW is becoming unusable with PP. This is major issue for us.

Last Sunday we went to a media file after a PP show, a video which was all preloaded, and EW just locked up again.

We find it can work at times, but in most services we have this problem. Often after showing the first PP file, the next ones tend to have this problem.

Again thanks for your help and response

That isn't normal. What I recommend for people having issues is to ALWAYS save PowerPoints to the older 2003 PPT file format, not the newer PPTx file format. PPTX essentially places the PPT presentation into a ZIP archive that PPT has to decompress before it can play. While it shouldn't cause any issues with modern computer hardware, when it does cause problems it causes them big time.

Also NEVER run a PPT from a flash drive or external drive of any sort, and don't even import it from them. Copy the file to your computer's hard drive (hopefully it's an SSD and not spinning rust which causes all sorts of other issues in itself), then import into EW Resource area, then place in the schedule. Skipping any of these steps can cause some of the problems you describe. And if you are running on a spinning rust hard drive make sure that you start the computer an hour or more before you start to give Windows 10 time to finish all of it's diagnostics, telemetry, etc. That can cause a spinning hard drive to 90 to 100% usage until it finishes making it difficult, if not downright impossible to do anything else. This can easily take up to an hour with a spinning hard drive, especially one that hasn't been used for several days. An SSD will accomplish all of this in about 5 minutes or less.


Make sure that the fonts that PowerPoint is using are all installed on the EW Presentation system. If one or more are not installed PPT will throw out a dialog box informing you of this. Unfortunately if PPT is running inside of EW that dialog box never appears so you don't have the option to click on the OK button to substitute a font.


If the PowerPoint is a timed, self running file such as an announcement loop, export it as an MP4 video file and play that instead. We do this every week and haven't had a problem in years.


Make sure you don't have two versions of MS Office installed. And this includes the starter or trial version a lot of pre-built computers have pre-installed. You have to UNINSTALL that version BEFORE you install a newer or full version.


A trick that I have used is to place a blank slide just before and just after any PPT presentations. I just create a new song with a single black slide that I insert. Don't use a picture, just set the background color to black. That will help EW close PPT completely when it finishes a presentation. We used to run up to 15 or more PPT presentations during a service and by following all of the above we never ran into any problems. I think the last PPT issue we had was back when we were using EW6 and PPT 2010 many years ago. And that was on a 2nd gen Core i5-2500 Sandy Bridge system with 8 gigs of ram and an old ATI HD 6870 graphics card. Of course it had an SSD and it ran EW7 and PPT just fine until we upgraded to 1080P displays instead of an old 1280 x 1024 projector a couple of years ago. That computer with a 1660 Super handled continued to handle PPT and EW just fine. And for the record, PPT is 99% dependent on the CPU. It really doesn't need much from a GPU.


And don't forget to check that link to PPT Troubleshooting.


As for support, EW has been pushing customers to their EasyWorship User Group (Official) on Facebook for the past couple of years. About the only people who post in these forums are people requesting assistance and EW Support People about once or twice a week. There is a much larger audience on the Facebook Group to answer questions, and EW Support appears to monitor it considerably more than it does the forums these days.


https://www.facebook.com/groups/2087084991602202/?source_id=378500525515268

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