Running PowerPointPipe

PowerPointPipe has two very important pre-requisites when running

1. Microsoft PowerPoint is not already running (especially with open documents).
2. No documents are opened by someone else (no sharing)

Both of these situations lead to file sharing violations. PowerPointPipe may appear to hang, and you will need to Alt-Tab to Microsoft PowerPoint to close the 'Open Read Only' dialog box.

This leads to our two recommendations when running PowerPointPipe:

1. Please close ALL other applications. This ensures that no programs have an PowerPoint document open.
   
   If PowerPointPipe says that Microsoft PowerPoint is still running, you may have to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to access the Task Manager and kill of all instances of POWERPNT.EXE manually.
    
2. If you are running PowerPointPipe across a network, file share or remote machine of any description, you MUST ensure that PowerPointPipe has exclusive access to those files, either through running PowerPointPipe after hours if you are guaranteed to have exclusive access, or by denying all users access to the files while PowerPointPipe is being run.

Speed and Performance

To get the fastest speed out of PowerPointPipe

• Ensure you disable virus scanning so that Microsoft PowerPoint will open documents faster
• Close all other running applications
• If possible, run PowerPointPipe directly on your File Server (Server Edition required, and local install of MS Office)
• Increase the process priority of POWERPNT.EXE in task manager.

See also

Running PowerPointPipe from the command line.