PowerPoint woes and moodle

August 23rd, 2007  Tagged ,

You know, I never have been able to convince my faculty to convert all their powerpoint presentations to flash or pdf. . . Imagine that!

Well, we are having a big problem with IE7 and ppt files in Moodle. If you click on the link, you get a presentation with a single blank slide. Reminds me very much of the old Windows 98 problem that was fixed with the first service pack. . . Integration with IE was problematic at times.

The only way I have been able to fix it so far is to append ?forcedownload=1 to the link in Moodle. The problem even occurs when I use a PowerPoint show. And I dislike those because you have to view full screen and endure the transitions.

I tend to think this is an IE problem. It happens with IE7 no matter which moodle version I test; it does not happen with IE6. I can’t replicate it with Firefox either. It happens whether in a new window, or loaded into the same window. But it is going to be great trouble to fix. Instructors will have to manually change every link since the students will likely not have Firefox installed.

Sigh. I am definitely too tired for this. More discussion here:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=76969

Possible fix here:http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-10538I have indeed applied this fix, and it seems to work very well! It targets only the ppt resources and appends the ?forcedownload=1 string to all the right documents. A very clever solution.

Update: Service pack is FINALLY out for Office 2007. Some people also reported relief for the blank white slide problem after tinkering with the security settings in IE. I think we have this sorted now. But I still have the patch on the server. I guess we will see how things go with a new build of Moodle 1.9.x for summer terms.

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