Insert Flash Movies Into PowerPoint 2010 - Using Developer Tab
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2010
Date Created: November 4th 2010
Last Updated: November 4th 2010
Excerpt/Capsule: Learn how to insert Flash movie into PowerPoint 2010, using Developer tab.
In PowerPoint 2010, there are two ways in which you can add a Flash movie to a PowerPoint slide -- inserting it as a normal movie through the Insert tab works as long as all recipients of your presentation use PowerPoint 2010. If any of them use PowerPoint 2007 or 2003, you should use the procedure explained on this page.
First of all, the Developer tab of the Ribbon has to be made visible. By default, this tab is not visible. You also need to have the updated version of Adobe's Shockwave Flash ActiveX control -- to make sure, you have the current version installed, go to this site using Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Remember: To bring in the Flash movie within PowerPoint, we need a Flash movie placed in the same folder which contains the PowerPoint presentation.
Follow these steps to insert a Flash movie into PowerPoint 2010 using Developer tab:
- Open the PowerPoint presentation and select the slide where you want
to insert the Flash movie.
- Access the Developer tab of the Ribbon, and within the Controls group,
click the More Controls button (highlighted in red, see Figure
1).

Figure 1: More Controls button
- This will bring up the More Controls dialog box that you can see in Figure
2. Select the Shockwave Flash Object option, and click OK.

Figure 2: Select to place a Shockwave Flash Object control
- The cursor will now turn into a crosshair. Drag and place an instance
of the control on the slide, as shown in Figure
3.

Figure 3: The placed Shockwave Flash Object control
- With the Flash movie inserted, you need to set the properties -- to
do that select the the inserted Flash control and within the Developer
tab of the Ribbon, click the Properties button within the Controls
group (see Figure 4). Alternatively you can right-click
the inserted Flash movie and choose Properties.

Figure 4: Access the Properties
- This will bring up the Properties pane that you can see in Figure
5.

Figure 5: Properties pane
- In the Properties pane, select the Movie option and type the name
of your Flash SWF (see Figure 6) -- no path is required
since the presentation and Flash movie (SWF) are placed
in the same folder. Also
make sure that the EmbedMovie option remains set to False, since
PowerPoint 2010's security options don't respect the True value
for EmbedMovie.

Figure 6: Properties pane with a link to the inserted Flash movie
- Close the Properties pane to get back to PowerPoint interface and
save the presentation.
Note: If you save your PowerPoint presentations with Flash movies inserted in them as the default PPTX files, then those Flash movies will not play in PowerPoint 2003 or previous versions (on Windows). To have them play in those older versions, you should work with PPT files (the older PowerPoint file format) rather than PPTX files.