Vanishing Backgrounds

[Guest]

I was working on a large project today - near to delivery date of course - and noticed that some slides which I seem to remember as functioning correctly before had a blank white background when run in Preview or published. I thought I must have made an error and reset the backgrounds of these slides. Then later I opened some more modules of the same project and found the same. But whereas the first lot of missing backgrounds were odd screen shot slides I had copied, these were templates imported from PowerPoint with the company logo and so on, and not one slide but all the slides using the template. In edit mode all seemed well, but for all the work I had based on the templates the background was blank in Preview and Show.

I can recover by creating new templates and importing, but it would be a great help to understand what is going on, so I can avoid a recurrence.

[Pensreg]

I suffered this problem today and came to this forum to see if my experience was unique. I found your post but was sad to see that there were no further comments. After some experimenting, I found that copying a background that functioned perfectly well in another slide would fail to be shown when pasted into the 'defective' slide. I couldn't establish anything that would point to the 'fault' of either the slide or the background image.

I then pasted the background image into good ole MS Paint, saved it to disk as a jpeg, which I then imported as an image into my defective slide and merged. Success! And I have no explanation as to why this should be so.

Can anyone enlighten us?

[Guest]

I agree...any help with this topic is greatly appreciated. Sometimes copying into Paint does't fix the problem for me. Seems like if I mess with a background at all (usually because it contained sensitive data on recording and needed to be altered later) I run a high risk of losing the background altogether. Common problem with me and I am desperate to understand if there is a bug behind this issue and whether or not anyone from Adobe is aware that this causes serious issues in the long run. HELP!

[jaggedpeak]

Don't know why this happens (and similar problems that I'll mention below), but Kevin Siegel addresses this in his most recent 'Skills and Drills' newsletter at iconlogic.com (Sep.30).

Problems that I've encountered include:
- corrupted background
- objects that are 'out of order' -- that is, I have the cursor 'in front', yet it slides behind 'lower' objects. Or an object in front of a highlighted area that appears in the preview or published versions as 'behind' the highlighted area.

Solutions:
- Corrupted background: Add a blank slide after the corrupt slide, copy the background from the corrupt slide and 'paste as background' in the new slide. Copy all of the objects from the corrupt slide into the new slide en masse. Delete the old slide. And... that's it. It should be fine now.
- 'out of order' objects: copy the offending object(s) and paste new versions in your slide. Delete the old object(s). It should be fine now.