Powerpoint Internal Recovery?

[Aepheme]

Ok, so... I made this mistake. I deleted all but 3 of the slides from
a presentation, and then accidently saved it as itself (instead of
saving it as a second file).

So, I lost the remainder of my presentation. And I can't use Auto
Recovery (it wasn't a crash), and I checked for remnants of files in
the temporary directory with an undelete program (none there).

However -- if I open the powerpoint file (with 3 slides in it) with
notepad, I can see the raw text of some of the slides that I "deleted".
So, the information must still be in the file. Is there a way to
recover that somehow?

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Short of a experienced file hacker, I doubt it.

What you are seeing in the note pad is the trash that PowerPoint has not
taken out yet. Unfortunately, there is really no way to undo the deletions
once the file has been over-saved.


--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
http://billdilworth.mvps.org

PowerPoint '05 | Sep 25-28 | San Diego CA http://www.pptlive.com
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[Aepheme]

Thanks, Bill. I gave up on looking for a way to automatically recover
the lost slides...

However, I was able to open a copy of the file in notepad, and manually
retype the missing slides into a new presentation from the raw text
shown in notepad. The text is distorted (lots of formatting
characters), but still readable.

Definitely preferable to trying to remember how and what you had said!
So, for future reference -- if you find that you've accidently deleted
slides and saved the file, always try to open it in notepad and you
still might find the info there.

Best of luck.