Fifty-Five Slides, Forty Minutes, No Network in the Room

The problem: a Paste Link chart is an OLE object that reads Q3 Forecast.xlsx by path. On a machine with no drive mapping, opening the deck either shows the last cached picture (silently stale - six charts are already three weeks old) or attempts to resolve the link and stalls, and Edit > Links will report the source as unavailable.

Do, in this order:

1. Refresh everything first, on your laptop, while the source is reachable. Confirm each of the fourteen charts matches the workbook - the six stale ones are the whole risk.
2. Break the dependency, not the data. Best option: recreate each chart as a native PowerPoint chart or embedded object fed by numbers pasted into the deck (a hidden data sheet). The file becomes self-contained and still editable.
3. If time forces it: Edit > Links > Break Link, which converts each chart to the last cached picture. Fast and safe to display, but frozen - acceptable for a one-way briefing, not for a session where someone may ask for a different cut.
4. Never rely on relinking in the room. No drive mapping, no internet, and a locked-down PC means you cannot fix a path at showtime.
5. Verify on a machine like the target: open the finished file on a PC that has no access to the drive and confirm no 'links' prompt and no empty frames.

The PDF fallback preserves the visuals but loses any build/animation and cannot be edited live - treat it as insurance, not the plan.

What happens without action: PowerPoint substitutes a font. Glyph widths differ, so lines reflow, text boxes overflow, and bullet alignment shifts - usually on the title and callout slides nobody re-checks.

Options:

• Embed fonts (File > Options > Save > Embed fonts in the file). Works only for fonts with TrueType outlines, is Windows-only, is ignored by PowerPoint for the web, and can be blocked by the font licence's embedding permissions. It also inflates the file. Worth trying, but not something to depend on for a locked-down Windows 2016 client unless you have tested the exact file on the exact build.
• Switch to a universally available font (for example Calibri or Arial) and re-check the line breaks on every slide that uses the custom face. This is the only option that guarantees fidelity on an unknown machine.
• Present from your own laptop - removes the problem entirely if the room allows HDMI input and you have a dongle.

Choice: switch the deck to the safe font and spend 30 minutes fixing overflow, and present from your own laptop if the room permits. Keep the embedded-font version only as a secondary. Carry the PDF as the guaranteed-fidelity last resort, and note it will not animate.

Timing: 55 slides in 40 minutes is about 44 seconds per slide before questions - that is a read-aloud, not a briefing. The 12-slide appendix alone would take roughly nine minutes.

• Move the appendix and the raw tables to hidden slides or a separate appendix section, jumped to only if asked. Target ~30 slides for the main narrative.
• Put the detailed numbers in a handout PDF, so the committee still leaves with the detail without you presenting it.
• Rehearse to a clock once; the first cut is always 20% too long.

Aspect ratio risk: a 16:9 deck on a 4:3 projector is letterboxed or cropped depending on the show settings. Check that no critical figure or caption sits in the outer 12% of either side. Changing the slide size to 4:3 reflows every shape and will break layouts - if you do it, do it before content edits and re-check every slide, not after.

Sequencing: fix fonts and charts first (correctness), then cut for time (narrative), then test on the target machine. Reversing that order means re-checking overflow twice.