Should recently created PowerPoint presentations received as email attachments be openable on a PowerMac G5 running Office 2004 for Mac?

I think all the files have file extension of "pps", both the ones that open OK and the ones that don't.

Further thought to all who have answered my original inquiry so far (i.e. Keith, BDAqua, Ramon and Texas): You all seem to imply that it SHOULD be possible for me to read incoming PowerPoint (".pps") files on my G5 PowerMac running Office for Mac 2004 under OS X 10.5.8. I simply wanted to establish first whether it would be worth my time trying to figure out what is preventing me from viewing pps files if it isn't even theoretically possible to do so (consistently and reliably) on my equipment.

From my browsing after reading all your responses, it appears that ".pps" files should be universally viewable across all platforms, because that's what the ".pps" file type is for, if I understand it correctly. Now what remains is to find out why I am not able to on my Mac. I have tried re-installing just the PowerPoint part of my Office suite from the original disc, followed by downloading and installing all the necessary updates issued by Microsoft since I bought my Office Suite in 2004 or 2005. This did not solve the problem. Then I tried logging of my Mac and logging back on under a "test" user profile created solely for that purpose, to determine if my usual user preferences might be the source of the problem (this has worked for other bugs in the past, unrelated to any Office apps), but this didn't help either.

I could try removing completely my entire Office suite and re-installing it, but it took me so long when I simply re-installed PowerPoint to run through all the updates issued since 2004 that I shudder to think of how long I'll be offline if I reinstall the whole suite from scratch again. Maybe this is a clue to the problem. The downloading of the updates didn't take so long, but after each download it took an ENORMOUS amount of time while the installer displayed the message "Searching for Programs to Update" and the spinning beachball kept spinning - literally hours each time. I think in my case it might take so long because I have what I guess is an extremely robust backup system, which includes not only Apple Time Machine, but also a mirrored RAID backup with one external bootable copy of my complete system, and an off-site, non-bootable complete copy of my primary hard drive. I guess that the Office Updtate software perhaps detects all these backup drives somehow and feels compelled to check through each one separately after downloading an update in order to determing what programs need updating with the newly downloaded update. If that is the problem, my thought is that I may need to temporarily de-activate all my backup systems while re-installing and re-updating my Office suite, then turn the backups back on again afterwards.

I have close to 202 Gigs available free space on my hard drive (out of 500 total). Remember, this is a mirrored RAID virtual hard drive, which means it is the effective free space on the drive combination - primary internal hard disk and secondary external hard disk. This is a downloaded, software-created RAID that installs itself in the boot sector of my OS so that all the drives in the RAID are bootable. The free space indicated on the actual primary internal hard disk drive is 3.07 gigs. But that is because the mirrored RAID arrangement makes it look like it is entirely used up by the (software) RAID setup. My desktop icon for my hard drive shows 202 gigs available free space. The software that accomplishes this is sold as a download from SoftRAID, which was recommended by the guy who wrote a book called something like "Taking Control of Backups on your Mac."

The other info you requested:

Model Name: Power Mac G5

Model Identifier: PowerMac7,3

Processor Name: PowerPC G5 (2.2)

Processor Speed: 2 GHz

Number Of CPUs: 2

L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB

Memory: 8 GB

Bus Speed: 1 GHz

Boot ROM Version: 5.1.8f7