Flash PowerPoint Blog
Thoughts and impressions of whatever is happening in the world of Flash PowerPoint.
See Also:
PowerPoint and Presenting Blog
PowerPoint and Presentation Glossary
I got this question from one of our readers:
Thank you for a very good tutorial on how to insert Flash into a PowerPoint presentation. I followed your instructions and it worked great on my computer. Now I have to send this presentation to different clients for a review and the problem starts ... some can't see the animation (even though they downloaded Flash Player through IE etc...) I am sending them my PowerPoint presentation file along with SWF files that are inserted in one folder. I instruct to open the presentation through PowerPoint applications but they still cant see what I made. I could not find anywhere on your site that explains how to properly publish your presentation and share with other people. If I cant distribute what I did then all the work was very much useless, all the presentations are given to other people and different conference and they all have different PCs. I would love to know if you can help or guide me in the right direction.
Well, the answer is to not embed the Flash file at all as per instructions on this page. Make sure you don't embed the file in the PowerPoint presentation -- then place both the SWF file and the external text file in the same folder as the PowerPoint presentation and insert the Flash control thereafter.
See Also: Cannot Embed Flash Movies in PowerPoint 2007
Labels: embed, flash, insert, powerpoint
This is from Jim Gordon, a Microsoft Office for Mac MVP.
Movies in PowerPoint for Mac are supported by Apple QuickTime. Unfortunately Adobe, the creators of Flash do not make a Flash codec for QuickTime, and no third party app exists that I know of to support Adobe Flash in QuickTime.
This wasn’t always the case. At one time QuickTime had support for early versions of Flash. It’s my impression from Adobe’s site that Adobe didn’t want to provide that support anymore, and stopped providing support to Apple’s QuickTime a few years ago.
Microsoft’s MacBU always looks at important customer concerns, and they act upon them. Those who would like to see support for Flash in PowerPoint should send feedback to Microsoft here...
Labels: flash, insert, mac, powerpoint
We just did a review on PowerFlashPoint 3.4 on Indezine.com.
This review was based on the FlashPPT Evaluate benchmark presentation -- here are the individual scores:
| Product | PowerFlashPoint 3.4 | |
| Evaluation Date | November 13th 2008 | |
| Feature | Score | Maximum |
| Bullets and Bullet Levels | 4 | 5 |
| Animated Bullets | 4.5 | 5 |
| Pictures (and Picture Rotation) | 5 | 5 |
| Animated Picture | 5 | 5 |
| Picture with Alpha Channel | 5 | 5 |
| Linked Picture | 5 | 5 |
| Clip Art and Clip Art, Recolored | 3.5 | 5 |
| Clip Art, Animated and Rotated | 5 | 5 |
| Shapes, Fills, and Lines without transparency | 3 | 5 |
| Shapes, Fills, and Lines with transparency | 3 | 5 |
| Shapes, Fills, and Lines with entry animations | 4 | 5 |
Overlapping text boxes with transparency | 4 | 5 |
| Geometry and mutual positioning of shapes, arrows and text boxes | 5 | 5 |
| Geometry and mutual positioning of slide objects - alignment | 3 | 5 |
| Text formatting | 5 | 5 |
| Animations and transitions | 4 | 5 |
| Embedded Flash movie | 5 | 5 |
| Linked movie clip | 5 | 5 |
Background music and transition sounds | 0 | 5 |
| Narration | 0 | 5 |
| Other Scores | Score | Maximum |
| Interface | 6 | 10 |
| PowerPoint 2007 Support | 8 | 10 |
| Help and Support | 4 | 10 |
| Output | 5 | 10 |
| Price | 3 | 10 |
| Total | 104 | 150 |
| Percentage | 69.3 | 100 |
Note: All scores are provided by the Indezine test team, and are the opinion of the individual tester -- all results are double-checked and the reviews go through a QC process.
Labels: add-in, evaluate, flash, powerflashpoint, powerpoint, review, score
If you have the time, and if you are familiar with Adobe Flash -- then there's this way of doing the PowerPoint to Flash conversion -- that's doing it manually! This approach lets you tweak, change, and edit the content as you deem fit. There's tons of stuff you can do with any slide object within the Adobe Flash interface -- and this is not really a tutorial on how to go into any such advanced stuff. However this tutorial on Indezine.com will get you started!
Learn here...
Labels: convert, flash, powerpoint
A reader sent me this question:
Is it possible to control the PowerPoint presentation with Flash? The opposite of this works, as can be seen on this link on the Microsoft site -- I would like to make Flash navigation to advance slides and control the PowerPoint animation.
The short answer is that this is not possible!
But there's a workaround -- and a rather long workaround. You can get your PowerPoint content into a product like Wildform Flair, and then add controls to the animations from within the program -- and then export this as a Flash SWF movie. Not exactly what you are looking for, but just another option.
Labels: flair, flash, powerpoint, wildform
We just did a review on iSpring Free 3.5 on Indezine.com.
This review was based on the FlashPPT Evaluate benchmark presentation -- here are the individual scores:
| Product | iSpring Free 3.5 | |
| Evaluation Date | August 21st 2008 | |
| Feature | Score | Maximum |
| Bullets and Bullet Levels | 5 | 5 |
| Animated Bullets | 5 | 5 |
| Pictures (and Picture Rotation) | 5 | 5 |
| Animated Picture | 5 | 5 |
| Picture with Alpha Channel | 5 | 5 |
| Linked Picture | 5 | 5 |
| Clip Art and Clip Art, Recolored | 5 | 5 |
| Clip Art, Animated and Rotated | 5 | 5 |
| Shapes, Fills, and Lines without transparency | 5 | 5 |
| Shapes, Fills, and Lines with transparency | 5 | 5 |
| Shapes, Fills, and Lines with entry animations | 5 | 5 |
Overlapping text boxes with transparency | 5 | 5 |
| Geometry and mutual positioning of shapes, arrows and text boxes | 5 | 5 |
| Geometry and mutual positioning of slide objects - alignment | 5 | 5 |
| Text formatting | 5 | 5 |
| Animations and transitions | 4 | 5 |
| Embedded Flash movie | 5 | 5 |
| Linked movie clip | 5 | 5 |
Background music and transition sounds | 3 | 5 |
| Narration | 3 | 5 |
| Other Scores | Score | Maximum |
| Interface | 7 | 10 |
| PowerPoint 2007 Support | 8 | 10 |
| Help and Support | 6 | 10 |
| Output | 4 | 10 |
| Price | 10 | 10 |
| Total | 130 | 150 |
| Percentage | 86.6 | 100 |
Note: All scores are provided by the Indezine test team, and are the opinion of the individual tester -- all results are double-checked and the reviews go through a QC process.
Labels: add-in, evaluate, flash, ispring, powerpoint, review, score
Often users ask about the differences between the free and pro versions of iSpring -- and while iSpring Solutions does have extensive documentation on the differences, I thought it will be nice to have that information available on the FlashPPT site.
Nina Lezhnina from iSpring sent me an exhaustive comparison.
| Features | Free | Pro |
| PowerPoint and operating system compliance | ||
| PowerPoint 2000/2002/2003/2007 | + | + |
| Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista | + | + |
| PowerPoint Objects Support | ||
| Grouped shapes, texts, images, vector shapes | + | + |
| Diagrams, Charts and Graphs | + | + |
| 3D objects and effects | + | + |
| Slide Masters (with animations and hyperlinks) | + | + |
| Internal and external hyperlinks | + | + |
| Conversion of large (200+ MB) presentations | + | + |
| Right-to-Left languages | + | + |
| PowerPoint Multimedia | ||
| 185+ animation effects | + | + |
| All slide transition effects | + | + |
| Synchronization of animations and sounds | + | + |
| Mouse driven animations | + | + |
| Repeated animations | + | + |
| Embedded Flash files | + | + |
| Embedded audio | + | + |
| Embedded video files | + | + |
| Presentation enhancements with iSpring | ||
| One click publishing | + | + |
| 6 integrated Players | - | + |
| Size and Scale customization | - | + |
| Flash movie Preloader | - | + |
| Full screen playback mode | - | + |
| Web links manager | - | + |
| Background audio for entire presentation | - | + |
| Background audio for separate slide | - | + |
| Looped playback | + | + |
| Flash menu disable | - | + |
| Flash presentation autostart | - | + |
| Mouse and keyboard playback control | - | + |
| References manager | - | + |
| Flash based player | ||
| Integrated Flash based Player | + | + |
| Live Preview | - | + |
| Customizable Player skins | - | + |
| Presenter info | - | + |
| Custom interactive logo | - | + |
| "Banner" creation mode | - | + |
| Show/Hide Player Buttons, Noteses, Thumbnails, Titles | - | + |
| Ink annotation tool | - | + |
| Possible destination | ||
| SlideBoom online portal | + | + |
| Local folder at My Computer | + | + |
| - | + | |
| Remote FTP server | - | + |
| Output formats | ||
| Flash file (.SWF) | + | + |
| HTML page | + | + |
| Executable file (.EXE) | - | + |
| Archive (.ZIP) | - | + |
| Flash movie packaging | ||
| Solid Flash movie | + | + |
| Separate Flash movies with Player | - | + |
| Standalone Flash movies without Player | - | + |
| Quality and Compression Control | ||
| Smart compression for images | - | + |
| Preset and custom compression modes | - | + |
| Video bitrate control | - | + |
| Audio compression | - | + |
| Smoothing of raster images | - | + |
| Frame rate control | - | + |
There are two more versions of iSpring: Ultra and SDK that add different or expanded abilities -- this page on the iSpring site has more info about these abilities.
Labels: flash, ispring, powerpoint, slideboom
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