Recovery for PowerPoint

Introduction
About Recovery for PowerPoint
Download and Installation
Using Recovery for PowerPoint
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

Introduction

What do you do when the presentation that you have been working on for more than a month now refuses to open -- PowerPoint just displays the message that this presentation is corrupted. I know that's not a very useful message at all. Just in case someone you know is wailing over a corrupt presentation, you can explain to them the many reasons why a presentation can get corrupted -- and you can also ask them why they did not keep a backup copy of their work? But that won't be too helpful! It's better you look at options that will help you recover the presentation -- our review product does just that.

About Recovery for PowerPoint

Recovery for PowerPoint is a program that recovers corrupt PowerPoint presentation files. It is from Recoveronix, a company based in Los Angeles, USA. You can learn more about their products from their site.

Standard features includes

Support for all PowerPoint file versions including PowerPoint 2007

Restores presentation structure and layout

Recovers text and formatting including fonts, alignment, rotation, etc

My contact at Recovery for PowerPoint for this review was Emil Sildos - thank you, Emil.

Download and Installation

Download the installer, run the setup routine and follow the instructions. You'll end up with an Recovery for PowerPoint program group in your Windows Start menu (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: Recovery for PowerPoint program group

Using Recovery for PowerPoint

Follow these steps to recover a corrupt PowerPoint file:

1. Go to your Windows Start menu and choose All Programs | Recovery for PowerPoint | Recovery for PowerPoint (see Figure 1 above).
2. This launches the Recovery for PowerPoint interface, as shown in Figure 2
3. 
   Figure 2: Recovery for PowerPoint interface
4. Click on the Recover button -- this opens a dialog box from where you can select the corrupt PowerPoint file, as shown in Figure 3.
5. 
   Figure 3: Recover
6. After selecting the file, click on the Recover button.
Note: Multiple files cannot be selected.
3. This will start the recovering process, which could take some time depending upon the file size. In between the recovering process a window will open which will prompt to save the recovered file with a prefix as Recovered as shown in Figure 4.
4. 
   Figure 4: Save file
5. Choose a save location.
4. Finally, the Recovery for PowerPoint interface displays info about the recovered file as shown in Figure 5.
5. 
   Figure 5: Recovered file

In our test corrupt file, Recovery for PowerPoint could only recover the text part of the presentation -- all the images were lost.

Pricing and Support

Recovery for PowerPoint costs $149.00 for single user license, multi user licenses are also available.

Support options include an online FAQ -- they also provide phone support.

Conclusion

Recovery for PowerPoint is something of a last resort when you are stuck with an important file that refuses to open. So, it's important that you can at least recover something from the file so that you don't have to start all over again.