Previously PADI didn’t include the PADI Open Water Course PowerPoint presentation with their IDC Crew Pack, but now they do.
Unfortunately, on some Apple Macs the IDC Crew Pack Open Water PowerPoint presentation doesn’t work so well. Here’s how to fix it.
The problem isn’t on just one type of Apple Mac either. In fact, we’ve recreated the problem on an iMac, Macbook, Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. They all run either flavours of Mac OSX 10.7 or 10.8.
What they all do have in common though is PowerPoint for Mac, installed from the Microsoft Office 2011 suite.
The PADI Open Water Diver Course DVD included in the IDC Crew Pack, Multilingual Prescriptive Lesson Guides, contains two PC MSI files and two Macintosh DMG files, which are Spanish and English respectively.
For the purpose of this HowTo I only focus on the English version DMG.
So, once you mount the DMG it tells you to drag the folder to your Applications folder (desktop works fine too) and 800 odd MB of data is copied to your computer. The main file in the folder is called master.pps and is the main menu file for the presentation. It all loads well and good.
Problem #1
You can then click on View by Section or View by Focus, and both links work fine.
However, once you try to click on a link that links to another file, Safety Concepts Review for instance, you might encounter an error in the lines of “This presentation could not be found”.
The “problem” is that the links are relative, pointing to the PowerPoint files in the directory – which is correct and should work, but it seems in the earlier versions of PowerPoint 2011 there was a bug that prevented this from working when you moved your presentations.
Solution #1
There’s nothing wrong with these links and they really should work, so I made sure my PowerPoint 2011 installation was up to date. Turns out, there had been a Service Pack 1 and 2 since I last bothered to do an update.
I downloaded and installed first Service Pack 1 and then Service Pack 2, and after that this linking problem was solved for me.
Get the service packs here. 258MB (SP1) and 115MB (SP2).
Problem #2
The next problem comes when clicking on either Knowledge Review or Confined Water Diver Preview.
Both my desktop iMac, and the boss’ Macbook Air, appeared to hang when these two links (to CW.ppt and KR.ppt) were clicked.
I left the Macbook Air hanging while searching for a solution on my iMac, and after about 5 minutes or so the Macbook Air eventually loaded the link.
Those two presentations are not very big. CW.ppt is about 2mb and KR.ppt is about 32MB, so the computers should be able to handle them no problem.
However, the entire Open Water Diver Course folder is about 800MB, so there are plenty of video on there and I suspected the references to be a problem.
CW.ppt is 80 slides big, of which 36 have embedded video. KR.ppt is 219 (!) slides big and also have a significant number of embedded vids.
Still, it shouldn’t take so long to open.
Solution #2
Open it. Save it. Done.
It’s probably better to do this after you’ve installed the Service Packs. The catch is, when you open it from within PowerPoint (don’t run it as a slideshow), it might appear to hang again, but just wait it out – it loads eventually.
I figure maybe PADI created the slideshow on an older version (or PC version for all I know) that doesn’t play well with this newer, Mac version and it just needed a re-save.
After you save it (no need to change anything, just CMD+S and you’re done), it not only opens faster again in PowerPoint, but it also loads faster when you click the link from within the PADI Open Water Diver Course presentation.
So far, problems solved.
Also posted on PADI PROS BLOG and PADI Facebook.
I am helping my wife, a certified Master SCUBADiver Trainer, set up the new OWD prescriptive lesson guides.
The first thing we found is that in Windows, you need the free PowerPoint viewer. OK, we do not use Windows; my wife has a Mac and I use Linux Ubuntu.
So the options for Mac: BUY the full PowerPoint product from Microsoft; Linux: No options (well, not true, I can set up Powerpoint viewer to run under WINE, but I should not have too.)
If you are going to create a World Wide product as a World Wide organization, how about realizing that Microsoft is not the World. I am urging my wife, and any other Instructors out there that read this, to contact PADI and let you know they will not use this OWD prescriptive lesson guides product until it supports other options such as Open Office, Mac, etc.
I will help her develop a multi-platform slideshow that presents the same information as this lame product attempts to do, if she wishes to go that route. To have to buy either a Windows computer or Microsoft Powerpoint for Mac to run one program is absolutely asinine.
Good read, I think I will need it when I can actually get my PADI DVDs to show anything! When I put them in, it just says they are blank DVDs and the Guide to Teaching, just gets spat straight out. Any ideas on how I might be able to fix this? I put a normal DVD movie in there and it plays fine….?
I’m not a 100% sure on this, but you might have to access the DVD icon like you do a hard drive, explore the contents and find the starter file, which might be inside another folder – probably the reason it doesn’t auto-play on startup.
If I remember correctly the DVDs are not Mac friendly and needs a manual jump-start.
Hope you get it working as much as I hope PADI will soon realise the world has moved on from Windows XP.
I had lost all hope that I could actually use the prescriptive guides on my laptop until I found this. I had the long loading times on my Macbook Air until I followed your solution to problem #2. Everything works nice and fast now, just as it should. Thanks so much for this!
Pleasure Russ, thanks for the feedback. Always good to hear when it works for other people as well.