On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:23 AM, <mn-linux.org at cyberians.net> wrote: > My problem: The company I work for has multiple contributors to a > PowerPoint file which is then displayed on several informational > monitors. Since several people are periodically modifying the same > file, it can occasionally get messed up. The thing I'm not clear on is how they are accessing the file. Can you use file locking? If not, is one person making edits that might be deleted when the file is overwritten by the next user? Are different people editing the same slide within the file? If there is one user per slide, I would divide the file up so that there is one slide per file. When I wanted to display it, I'd use something that converts each slide to PDF, then I'd aggregate the PDF files, and I'd use a PDF viewer to display the slideshow instead of using PowerPoint. I'd also dump microsoft altogether and use OpenOffice because you're going to find it a little easier for converting to PDF, but this might not fly with the PowerPoint users in your workplace. I can show you some software I've been working with for automating file conversion. You will want these: unoconv -- convert .ppt to .pdf on the fly pdftk -- PDF toolkit, used to concatenate PDF files into one big file Mike