PPS files still don't work even after I created an association - what do I do?

First off let me remind you that you must have either PowerPoint or PowerPoint Viewer installed. PowerPoint comes with Microsoft Office, and the PowerPoint Viewer is a free download from Microsoft (here). The difference is, of course, that PowerPoint will let you create PowerPoint presentations, while the viewer will only allow you to view them.

Now, as I stated in my previous article This file does not have a program associated with it - what does this mean and what do I do?, the most common solution is to simply install the program that understand PPS files. If you don't have Microsoft Office, that means downloading and installing the free PowerPoint Viewer. Setting it up should create all the appropriate associations for you to be able to view PPS files.

If you have Microsoft Office, you can perform a repair install, making sure that PowerPoint is, in fact, installed.

Unfortunately for some folks all that doesn't appear to work. Very well, we'll do things the hard way ... meaning we'll do it by hand.

I'm going to assume you have successfully installed the free PowerPoint Viewer.

Fire up Windows Explorer (right click on My Computer and click on Explore is one quick way). Click on the Tools menu and then the Folder Options item. In the resulting dialog, click on the File Types tab, and you should see something like this:

Scroll down to the PPS entry, or where the PPS entry should be alphabetically. If you don't find a PPS entry, click the New button and enter PPS into the resulting dialog to create one.

Click on the entry for PPS, and then click on the Advanced button. The result will look something like this:

For the moment we'll ignore the entry that says "Print", and focus on the other - "Show". What seems to be unique about PowerPoint Viewer is that it doesn't use the word "Open", but rather "Show" as the action to perform. My theory is that that's the cause of much of the confusion.

If "Show" doesn't exist in the list, click on New..., enter:

&Show

into the Action box, and then:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\PowerPoint Viewer\pptview.exe" "%1"

Into the Application used to perform action: field. Go ahead and check DDE as well, entering "pptview" (without the quotes) into the Application field, and "System" into the Topic field.

Press OK.

If you did have a "Show" option, or you just created one, you can check it by clicking on "Show", and then clicking on Edit.... The result should look something like this:

Note that even though it's not entirely displayed, if you click in the field Application used to perform action:, and scroll to the right, you'll see it contains the entire string:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\PowerPoint Viewer\pptview.exe" "%1"

Press OK, and you should be back at the "Edit File Type" dialog pictured earlier.

Important: click on the "Show" action, and then click on the Set Default button. The "Show" item should turn bold, as seen in the image above. This tells programs which action is the "default" thing to do with a PPS file under certain conditions.

OK and Close your way back out, and you should now have a proper association.

Note: as I said this assumes the free PowerPoint Viewer, which you'll have had to download and install, and it assumes you installed it to its default location. If you're using PowerPoint itself, you'll need to locate "powerpnt.exe" on your hard disk and enter its path instead of "pptview".

If you'd like to create the "Print" action, the steps are the same, except that the Application used to perform action: is:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\PowerPoint Viewer\pptview.exe" /p "%1"

Thanks to one of my readers for pointing out the potential role of "Show" in people's confusion on this issue.

Update: Ramesh's Site includes an article Unable to open .PPS attachments directly from Outlook Express? which includes not only instructions similar to the above, but a utility that you can run to install the fix for you.