Most of the article I wrote about recovering corrupt PowerPoint files is available on the MS Office Online site

But I wanted to include more complete information on third-party recovery tools. So I’ll add that info here and put the full text of the article up sometime in the near future.

If you don’t have any luck recovering your file by using any of the methods you read about at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011168781033.aspx, you might want to consider trying a third-party recovery tool.

Because these third-party products do not include all of PowerPoints functionality, or because they might not support elements of that functionality in their import utilities, you can sometimes use them to open files that PowerPoint identifies as corrupt.

Although you may not recover everything in your presentation, these third-party products are worth a try — especially as a last-ditch effort to recover your file.

Star Offices presentation program, StarImpress, can sometimes open files that PowerPoint considers corrupt. You can download Impress from http://www.staroffice.com/.

OpenOffice is the free version of Star Office. You can download the presentation application from http://www.openoffice.org/.

CorelDraw and CorelPresentations can also import PowerPoint slides: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel2/Home.

PowerPoint Recovery. I have not had any luck using this tool to recover corrupt presentations, but I admit I have not tried the latest version: http://officerecovery.com/powerpoint/.