I receive a lot of PowerPoint presentations from Windows users at work. One of the biggest annoyances in PowerPoint is that it doesn't convert all the graphic metafiles at once. Instead, the metafiles are converted one at a time as I go through the presentation slides one by one. If you use PowerPoint, you are probably familiar with this behavior. You open up PowerPoint, and a dialog box pops up that states "graphics filter... converting metafile." This is a significant hit in my productivity, and destroys my momentums as I go through the presentation, since I have to wait for the conversion to complete before I can view the slide.
Since I prefer to load all the graphic metafiles at once, I found a way to get around this that works for me. There may be a better way, and if so, I would love to hear your comments.
Open up the PowerPoint file as normal. You may get the annoying dialog box once or twice as it converts graphic files for the first slide. After the dialog box disappears, immediately go to File: Print, or hit Command-P. When you do this, all the other graphics metafiles will convert at once. When the conversion is done, the Print dialog box will appear, and you can Cancel it. After that, you can view the presentation without annoying interruptions from the graphics metafile dialog box.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060623222052629