powerpoint files

When I was a pc i kept all my data on a portable hard drive. So now I plug that hard drive into my new imac and open a powerpoint file into office for mac powerpoint. I can open the file and change the slides I just can't save the file when I'm finished working on it. I don't suppose that this is enough information for someone to help me, but I am frustrated. The file does say read only. That is most likley the problem. How can I change the file into read and write? or what can I do to make it work?

Can you copy or drag the relevant file to your Mac and then open and when finished save 'Save As'?

Was that drive formatted NTFS?

Dear santa: the problem is that the drive is formatted NTFS, which is a Windows format that the Mac can READ, but not WRITE TO. So you can open files all day, you just can't save any changes.

Solutions include getting a third-party NTFS driver that will allow you to write to NTFS drives; OR you could reformat the drive for Mac; OR you could copy the file from the NTFS drive to the Mac drive, whereupon you can save the file.

Thanks to all who replied. I did try the copy from the NTFS drive to the mac drive.
It worked. I think the big problem for us switchers is that we expect things to be difficult.
This was a little clumsy but straight forward. Thanks again

Sorry, another thought. I have many word and powerpoint files on that hard drive so maybe reformatting is the answer for the long term. Can I reformat without erasing all the files? It seems like I remember in windows when you reformatted a hd you wiped it clean.

Reformatting will, as the name implies, erase the hard drive and delete all the files.

Why not just move the files in question to your Mac hard drive, then reformat, then move them back?

or you can avoid reformatting and as chas_m mentioned earlier

getting a third-party NTFS driver that will allow you to write to NTFS drives

Click to expand...

you can try these two options:

Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X 9.0

or

NTFS-3G 2010.10.2

HTH

Thanks for your responses. Is there a way to copy all of one kind of file at a time over to the mac hd from the portable hd?

i don't know if this is what you want but you can go to finder and do a search on your Macintosh HD for the files you want and transfer them to your external hard disk.

santa said:

Thanks for your responses. Is there a way to copy all of one kind of file at a time over to the mac hd from the portable hd?

Click to expand...

Yes. There are several ways to do this.

The easiest is probably just to open a Finder window for the drive in List view, and click on the "Kind" heading, which lists the files by type (alphabetically).