Blackboard Collaborate (formerly from Elluminate) allows online learning in a virtual classroom. Instructors are able to present material and discuss it with attendees in the classroom, just like a physical classroom. PowerPoint presentations from Microsoft Office are commonly used for the presentations and you simply import the content.
In Blackboard Collaborate, you simply join the session as an instructor and the click the load content button and point the file browser to your .ppt file. With the start of a new school year, I worked with an instructor who was receiving an error message upon trying to import a PowerPoint:
Failure calling powerpoint to process presentation.
You could, however, see that PowerPoint was being called successfully but it would present an error about being unable to open or access a file from a temporary location.
The instructor was trying to do this on OS X 10.10 Yosemite with Office 2016 for Mac. I tried converting the file from .pptx to .ppt as the documentation suggests but received the same error. My initial suspect was PowerPoint 2016 being the culprit, as too new and incompatible. Fortunately, I was able to find documentation that indicated this as a known issue with OS X 10.10.
Open your presentation in PowerPoint and choose ‘File, Export…’. Choose to export the file as JPEGs and where to save the folder of images.
Back to Blackboard Collaborate, choose ‘Load Content’ and select all of the images by using Apple+A or clicking the first one and holding Shift while clicking the last one. With all images highlighted, click the ‘Open’ button.
On the next prompt, choose ‘Import Images as individual pages’ and click ‘Load’.
You should then see each PowerPoint slide available as a page, and in the right order, the same as if the import of the .pptx file had worked in the first place.