Convert PowerPoint to Flash Manually
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2002, 2003, and 2007
Date Created: November 10th 2008
Last Updated: February 27th 2009
Excerpt/Capsule:
If you read the title of the page above, one word that stands apart is "manually" -- let me explain why. Look around this site, or search online and you'll run into tens (maybe hundreds) of PowerPoint to Flash converters that plug into PowerPoint and create some semblance of Flash presentations for you with one click. Some of them do an awesome job -- and even those may not do things perfect all the time.
If you have the time, and if you are familiar with Adobe Flash -- then there's another way of doing this 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 will get you started!
The basic skeleton of this tutorial was inspired by Ellen Finkelstein's tutorial on importing a PowerPoint presentation into Flash -- here's a link to that tutorial... Ellen is a well known PowerPoint expert who has authored several books -- and I wish to thank her for allowing me to use her content.
This tutorial involves two programs: Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Flash -- first, I'll show you how to proceed with the PowerPoint part of this tutorial.
Saving PowerPoint slide into WMF
- Open your presentation in PowerPoint. For this tutorial, I used the Earth Day presentation that you can download from this site.
- PowerPoint 2007 users can click the Office button and choose Save As | Other Formats, as shown in Figure 1. Users of previous PowerPoint versions can choose File | Save As.
Figure 1: Save As
- Either way, this opens the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 2. Choose the destination folder, and in the Save as type drop-down list, choose Windows Metafile (*.WMF), and click Save.
Figure 2: Save As .wmf
Note: WMF is a vector format, and Flash accepts all vector formats. These WMF files can be resized without losing their resolution.
Related Link: Learn more about the difference between vector and bitmap graphics.
- This brings up a message window asking if you want to export every slide or just the current slide (see Figure 3). Click the Every Slide button.
Figure 3: Every Slide
- Once these slides are exported, PowerPoint opens a message window stating the folder where the slide WMFs have been saved.
Figure 4: PowerPoint Message
- Figure 5 shows the folder containing all the sequentially numbered WMF files -- you'll find a WMF for each slide in your source presentation.
Figure 5: Sequentially numbered WMF files
- In the next part of this tutorial, I'll show you how you can import these WMFs inside Adobe Flash.
