Yesterday I ran into a really nasty problem with PowerPoint 2003. Whenever I tried to open a presentation that I had created before reformatting my hard drive (which is about all of them), I would get the following error message:

"The presentation cannot be edited because it contains a read-only embedded font."

The presentation would open, and I could view every slide, etc. But, I couldn’t make any changes. I couldn’t select any of the text, let alone modify it. I also could not resave the file under another filename.

A Google search brought up the following helpful thread on Google Answers. The problem has to do with new functionality in PowerPoint 2003 designed to stop people from pirating typefaces by embedding them in their presentation files. If the presentation contains a typeface not installed on your PC, PowerPoint will lock the presentation down in the manner described above.

There is very little you can do to work around this. First, you can install the missing font. Now, the error message doesn’t tell you what font is missing (duh). You have to find this out manually by opening the presentation in PowerPoint and using File > Properties > Contents, getting the list of fonts used in the presentation, and manually comparing that to the fonts you have installed on your computer. In my case, the culprit was Arial Unicode MS. In my case, this font was installed when I installed MS Office. It isn’t installed by default, so you need to go into the custom install options and make sure all the international support options are turned on. That’s what I did, and it fixed the problem.

Another solution is to open the presentation in an older version of PowerPoint (anything before PPT 2003) and remove the offending font from the presentation.

Although embedding fonts in your presentation makes a lot of sense (so that they display the same on every machine) keep in mind that there is a good chance that this will also lock the file down, preventing users from editing it.