Illustrator 9.0 EMF in Power Point NO LONGER DISPLAYED in Win2000

[Werner_Hemmert@adobeforums.com]

Hi,
I use Illustrator 9.0 to create all my graphs and I import them as recommended:

To insert an EMF graphic, choose Insert > Picture, click From File, locate and select the EMF graphic, and then click Insert. To import an EMF graphic using the Paste Special command, copy the artwork in Illustrator, open the Office application, choose Edit > Paste Special, select Picture (Enhanced Metafile) in the Paste Special dialog box, and click OK.

In the meanwhile (2003) our system is Win2000, but since Feb. 2004 PowerPoint is no longer able to display these graphs (on more than two different computers; other systems running Win XP have no problems). On the left upper corner of the graph there appears a red cross, followed by Adobe Systems ( x Adobe Systems) and the empty graph. And that happened in all files at once, even if they worked fine before and on XP. You can right click on the graph and type "Edit Figure", then say yes to "convert to Microsoft-Artwork". Then the graph appears again, however sometimes conversion errors occurr.

For me this situation is completely inconvenient because I lost all my PowerPoint presentation from the last xx years, so I would be very greatful if someone knows a solution.

Thanks Werner

[Eric_Schwartz@adobeforums.com]

Werner:

This is a known issue. It was caused by a Microsoft security patch that was released back in April (and obviously was installed on your system).

It seems to only impact EMF and WMF files that were exported from Illustrator (9, 10, and CS...maybe older versions as well) and contained text elements. If the text was converted to outlines and then exported, those EMF and WMF files seem to be fine.

Do a search on this forum and you'll find a lot of postings. There is also a link to Microsoft's site with a patch. However, EVERYONE in your organization and those that open your PPT and DOC files would also need to install the patch. Obviously this isn't practical since you can't force everyone to install the patch.

Adobe seems to expect people to export all of their AI files as PNG for importing into MS Office apps. This is ridiculous since most of the time we're dealing with vector material and not raster.

Bottom line: those of us that have thousands of legacy documents are screwed! You will have to manually go in and re-export all of the graphics with text converted to curves if you want to keep them in metafile format. Otherwise, you'll have to export them out as PNG or JPG and reimport into Word and PowerPoint.

Yes...a big PITA.