I recently discovered a bug in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. If you insert a movie file into a PowerPoint presentation and you’re using the older .ppt file format, the link to the movie breaks when you close the file. I’ve confirmed that this problem occurs with .wmv and .mov movie files, and I assume it occurs with any other type of movie file. I’ve had a couple of clients encounter this bug. I reported this problem to Microsoft, but it hasn’t been fixed as of the time of this writing. There is an easy solution to this problem. Use PowerPoint 2011’s native .pptx file format instead of the older .ppt file format.

Here’s what I did to fix the problem:

1. Open the .ppt PowerPoint file.
2. Go to the File menu and select Save As
3. In the Format section, select PowerPoint Presentation (.pptx)
4. Click the Save button. This will convert the presentation from .ppt format to the newer .pptx format
5. Go to the slide where you’d like to place a movie.
6. Go to the Insert menu and select Movie and then Movie From File
7. Navigate to the folder on your Mac which contains the movie file you want to insert into your presentation.
8. Select the movie file and click the Insert button.
9. Go to the File menu and select Save.

The movie has now been imported to your presentation and will be saved within your PowerPoint file. You can check the size of your PowerPoint .pptx file to see that it has grown significantly now that the movie is saved inside it. When I was figuring out what the problem was I noticed that the file size of the .ppt file didn’t grow after I inserted the movie and saved the file. This told me that it wasn’t working properly. I also knew that I’d seen this feature work in other PowerPoint 2011 presentations. I then realized that the difference was that some files were .ppt files while others were .pptx files. That’s when I realized that this insert movie feature failed to work whenever I used the .ppt file format.