We ran into a very peculiar problem today:

After Microsoft has deployed the latest security update for Office (MS10-087), some of our slides started to fail to load in PowerPoint (both 2007 and 2010) with the following error:

PowerPoint was unable to display some of the text, images or objects on slides in the file ..., because they have become corrupted.

After some investigation, it turned out to be not all presentations, but only the ones containing a certain type of tables with merged cells. I have distilled the problem to two very simple PPT files (we are still using the Office 97-2003 file format): both open fine in PowerPoint, but when roundtripped through Aspose.Slides, one fails to open.

I have attached the both files as well as a simple program.cs to reproduce the problem. I have tried and successfully reproduced with the latest version of Aspose.Slides (4.4.0.0).

Currently, the best workaround is to uninstall the security update (for example, for Office 2007, this means uninstalling KB2289158) but we are looking for a more viable solution.

Please advise.

Thank you,

David.

Note: even with the "good" presentation, things start to break as soon as I as much as add one row to the table, so the problem is worse than I originally thought.

For example, the following code will cause Powerpoint to fail to load the slide after I save the presentation:

            foreach (Aspose.Slides.Shape shape in presentation.Slides[0].Shapes)
            {
                if (shape is Aspose.Slides.Table)
                {
                    table = (Aspose.Slides.Table)shape;
                    break;
                }
            }

            if (table != null)
            {
                table.AddRow();
            }

Dear David,

Thanks for your interest in Aspose.Slides.

First of all, I would like to appreciate your such a detail analysis as it will prove really helpful towards issue resolution. An issue with ID 21540 has been created in our issue tracking system too further investigate and resolve the problem. This thread has also been linked with the issue, so that you may be automatically notified, once the issue is resolved.

We are sorry for your inconvenience,

---

Mudassir Fayyaz
Support Developer
Aspose Sialkot Team
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Have you heard any news regarding this issue? We are currently advising our customers to uninstall the Microsoft security hotfix which is not a great workaround. Any help on how to get around this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

David

Dear David,

I regret to share with you that I have verified from our issue tracking system and the issue specified by you has not been resolved. I have requested our development team to share the ETA for the fix. As soon as some information is shared by them, I will be obliged to share that with you.

Thanks and Regards,

---

Mudassir Fayyaz
Support Developer
Aspose Sialkot Team
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Aspose - The .NET and Java Component Publisher

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I am experiencing the exact same symptoms. Uninstalling the microsoft security hotfix KB2289158 is impossible for our customer. Any updates?

For me, the issue only happens when my slides contain tables. One workaround is to replace tables with regular rectangles (new rows can be dynamically added by adding new rectangles below and copying the paragraphs of each rectangle's textframe).

The biggest inconvenience of this approach is that PowerPoint will no longer render the table as a table, which means you will loose functionality such as column resizing.

I am not sure if there are other situations where slides would break othen than when they have tables in them.

Dear David,

Thanks for sharing the added piece of information related to use of table to be the cause of the issue. It will further help our development team to investigate the issue in more detail. As this thread has been linked with the issue, so every worthy client posting his query in this thread will be notified through and automatic email, once the issue will be resolved.

Thanks and Regards,

---

Mudassir Fayyaz
Support Developer
Aspose Sialkot Team
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I have encountered same problem in presentations we prepare for our clients.
I have some template slides, with a table which has one or twoe empty rows. I open the slide with Aspose.Slides, fill the table, and add as many additional rows as necessary, one by one.

The are 4 different tables in my templates, only one of them is affected by the problem. I was not able to capture the specific difference which resulted in a situation that one of the tables cannot be read by powerpoint anymore, while others still work, but I was able to find a workaround.

I found out that the specific line in my code, which caused the error was
MyTable.AddRow
As I mentioned, I had a small table in the template, and I was adding additional rows one by one, depending on the expected content of the table.
A workaround I used, was to change the template I am using - right now instead of one-row table, I have a table with a maximum number of rows, that can appear on the slide. I am filling as many rows as necessary, and then remove the empty rows from the bottom of the table using method
MyTable.DeleteRow
This seems to work fine, I can resize the table afterwards, and get exactly the same slide layout as I had before the problem appeared.

I hope that the problem will be solved soon. Our clients have not yet installed the office update and if they do, we are able to recreate all ppts using the above workaround. But it would be nice to know what exactly causes the problem, to avoid it in the future.

Regards,
Bartosz

Dear Bartosz,

Thanks for your interest in Aspose.Slides.

I really appreciate your efforts in helping us narrowing down to core issue as it will be really helpful for our development team to resolve the issue. Hopefully, the work around method shared by you will certainly help all others to get things going for the time being until issue is resolved.

Thanks and Resolved,

---

Mudassir Fayyaz
Support Developer
Aspose Sialkot Team
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This is a nice workaround!

Unfortunately, it is not always the case that MyTable.AddRow would cause the issue. In my original post, I had an example with a table that had merged cells (bad.pptx). All I needed to do in order to reproduce the problem was to roundtrip the file through Aspose.Slides, that is, only load and save.

David

It is not an option for us to modify all our templates. This would be a huge amount of work.
We creating lots of different ppt slides for our costumers.
It would be very important for us to have this issue solved in near future.
When can we a expect the fix for this issue?

Please keep me informed.

Thank you,
Mathias

Dear  Mathias,

I have discussed issue with our development team and feel sorry to share that the source of the issue is unidentified so far. As soon as the source is identified and issue is resolved, we will be obliged to share the information with you.

Thanks and Regards,

---

Mudassir Fayyaz
Support Developer
Aspose Sialkot Team
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I have had the same exact problem and tracked it to the AddRow faililng on a table. It has been over a month and this is a pretty serious bug in Aspose.Slides. We don't want to do a massive update to work around this bug.  We need to get an ETA on when Aspose will fix the problem so we know what to do. Thank you.

Hello Dear,

I am extremely sorry for your inconvenience. As I have shared earlier that the source of the issue is still unidentified, so under such circumstances, its hard to share any possible ETA. But we are working over this issue and as soon as some information is shared, I will be obliged to share that with you.

Thanks and Regard,

---

Mudassir Fayyaz
Support Developer
Aspose Sialkot Team
Contact Us
Aspose - The .NET and Java Component Publisher

Keep in touch! We're on Twitter and Facebook