I can no longer export a keynote to PPT

What versions are you using? I just did a little test using Keynote '09 version 5.0.4 and PP 11.5.5 (2004 I think) and it worked fine. I do my best to never use PP so I have a really old version and maybe that is what is allowing me to do this.

Definitely not ideal, but if you need a short term solution, you can download OpenOffice for Mac for free and it should work to get you through until the problem is resolved.

I've got the same versions as you, KN 5.0.5 and PP 12.2.8 and have only a minor, albeit irritating, anomaly. The exported PP doc opens fine, but the sound doesn't play until I set it up again in PP. The sound files are present, they're just not activated automatically, to play as they had in the original KN file.

I came here because I just discovered the same problem.
A client who opened up my converted Keynote on PC Powerpoint just notified me that a third of the slides are blank.
I opened up the file in my Mac Office 2011 and saw the same problem.
When I opened it up in Mac Powerpoint 2004, everything was fine.

This has never been an issue before and it's now a big problem for me.

OK just found an easy workaround to my problem.
I opened it up in Powerpoint 2004 and re-saved it.
After that, it opened up fine for me in Mac PowerPoint 2011.
I'm still waiting to see if it'll work for the client on PC, but
I have a good feeling it will.
Of course, if you don't have an older ppt, this isn't of much help.

Is Apple going to publish a patch to fix this? It has become a huge issue
for us and may force us to dump Keynote completely 😟.

I don't think that this is an Apple problem. I have updated to the newest Keynote (5.0.5) and have no problem with PP opening in my old version of PP. This leads me to believe that the problem is with the recent PP update.

I've been having the same issues between Keynote 5.0.5 and PowerPoint 12.2.8, as well. The solutions listed above didn't work for me but after many hours of troubleshooting I think I found the culprits. The new version of powerpoint seems to be having issues "understanding" some very basic Keynote functions. The work arounds below have been working perfectly for me. Hope it helps your issues!

Before you export to Powerpoint:

- Make sure ALL placed images are RGB and not CMYK. This includes anything in your master slides. If you have CMYK placed images in your master slides, make sure you convert them and ALSO delete the old masters from your theme.

- "Grouped" images or text will cause the error. Make sure you un-group any images or text before exporting.

- Any "brush stroke" style line with more than two anchor points will not convert. Interestingly, the solid or dashed lines are ok but the other "stylized" lines are not.

After making those changes, I've been able to get the conversion to work 100% of the time. If I find any other incompatibilities, I'll continue to list them here. I'm assuming that there are significantly more (such as animations, etc) but these are the only incompatibilities I've found so far.

Good luck. And remember... even the worst day in Keynote is better than the best day in PowerPoint.

Hi, this worked for me as well, after spending hours finding the problem
THANKS!
Dennis, netherlands

Wished everyone is using Keynote 🙂

I have the same problem. Can't export from Keynote 5.0.5 to PPT 12.2.8.

Actually, unfortunately given how Microsoft plays, it is Apple's problem. Microsoft doesn't need to read Keynote because they want everyone to use PowerPoint. If Apple wants people to use Keynote, they need to be able to export to PPT or PPTX. If Microsoft has screwed that up, Apple needs to respond and figure out a way to make it work. Microsoft certainly won't make that work.

As much as I'd love to use Keynote, if I can't reliably share with PowerPoint, then sadly I will continue to use PPT, which is a huge shame.

If you don't need to make any changes to a presentation in PowerPoint, export that keynote file to PDF. It will work just fine as a presentation in that format on a PC or even on a Linux box. I use PDF format to distribute slides to the students for a class I teach.