Imported pps files will not play audio

For Brian Peat:

I tried everything you told me to do, (never heard of saving to a .key file before) but it did allow me to look inside the files. Tried 5 different pps or ppt files and none of them showed up with an audio file - everything was jpg and tiff. No matter what I named them, they would play in Keynote, but no audio.

I could go to Windoz Vista and open my Mac mail that had a pps file in it and I could open it there with Power Point Viewer and the file would play with AUDIO perfectly. So it looks like I wasted my money buying iWork 08 since I have no use for anything else in iWork.

Oh, I did try to find out what was in the pps files I already had stored in Vista - guess I don't know how to do that either. Thought looking at "properties" of each file would show me - but it did not.

Anyway Brian thanks for your suggestions - I did learn some things - but this is not the first time I wasted money and probably won't be the last!!!

For Brian and David: Checking the contents of just one pps file that has audio imbedded since the audio works in Vista shows 59 items. The majority of which are jpg; the rest are weird things like a folder named "contents" and inside of it is a file named "pkginfo" when opened shows ?????? in Text Edit. Another weird one is "index.apxl.gz"; this also opens with Text Edit a file named "index.apxl" which is huge - could not find an extractable audio file in there either. Two more folders, one named "QuickLook" which only has the first slide in it; last is a folder named "thumbs" which contains 57 items of tiff files.

I went to the link that David posted. Things don't look promising. Looks like Bill Gates is almost as good as our Administration in hiding things.

Thanks to both of your for your concern!!!

One more thing, the link you gave me suggests that Apple does not support WAV audio files, so therefore we are screwed. My QT plug-in tells me that QT will play WAV. BUT that does not do us any good since QT will not play pps/ppt/or key slideshows.

Looks like I will continue to open pps files in Vista using my free PowerPointViewer(PPV) - even how I got the PPV is strange. I could not download the exe file while in IE, I had to download it using Safari in Mac, then I mailed it to my e mail address I have in Windows Mail and I could install the program in Vista from there. No problems whatsoever.

I want to thank everyone for their suggestions. Besides the lack of audio, keynote does not do animations that appear in several of my pps files. So, I will continue to use my PPV in Vista to play these files. Also,nine out of ten files I have tried to open with Keynote show a warning that I do not have the right fonts installed.

So, as far as I am concerned this thread should be closed at least until Apple fixes Keynote.

My solution to the lack of audio while opening PPS files in Keynote is to run vista full screen, then play the PPS files with Microsofts Power Point Viewer. Which, BTW it works perfectly. I would rather use Apples Keynote, but if it does not do the job, then why even try.

I am not saying Keynote was designed to replace PPV, but I think it was hyped as another option possibly to allow Apple users to create presentations, which I hear it does a very good job at that.

After thought: Running vista ultimate full screen via Parallels version 3 does a really good job. You can run ALL Mac Applications right on top of Vista, and you don't have to concern yourself with "Sharing Folders" or wondering if your printer is going to work.

I guess I should have re-read my comments before hitting "post" but I didn't and I am sorry for that. I assumed that the "hype" about iWork was that it was a very good substitute for MSN's Power Point. Apparently from what I have read in these posts is that Keynote is very good at making presentations. However it is not good at viewing PP.

I am not a fan of anything Microsoft, but if that is the only way to view PP files the way they should be viewed then what choice do I have? THIS QUESTION DOES NOT REQUIRE AN ANSWER!

Neo Office did do animations and it played the audio, but only for the first slide. Maybe I have to study the application closer to see if I can do anything to have audio thru the whole slide show. At least it starts out good. Might take a day to figure it out, but I will post back when complete.