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In the first part of this tutorial, I showed you how you can export your PowerPoint slides as sequentially numbered WMFs, now let me show you how these WMFs can be imported inside Adobe Flash.
Note: In this tutorial, the screenshots show Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004, the same steps should work in newer versions of Flash too. Remember, Flash is now branded as Adobe Flash.
Importing the files into Flash
- Create a new Flash document, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: New Flash document - In the new opened document, click the first keyframe where you want to start. Now choose File | Import | Import to Stage, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Import to stage - This opens the Import dialog box, as shown in Figure 8, navigate to the folder where the WMF files were saved, and click the first file. Click Open.
Figure 8: Import - This will prompt a message asking if you want to import the entire sequence, as you can see in Figure 9. Click Yes.
Figure 9: Import images in a sequence - By doing so, Flash imports each successive WMF file onto a consecutive frame in the timeline, and makes each frame a keyframe as you can see in Figure 10. Save the Flash (.FLA) file.
Figure 10: Imported images in sequence - The imported .WMF files are vector files, you can edit the text in Flash. You can also ungroup other content on the WMF slides, and then edit those objects individually, to ungroup in Flash, choose Modify | Ungroup as shown in Figure 11.
Figure 11: Ungroup slide objects in Flash - The ungroup option converts all PowerPoint slide objects as individual components in Flash that can be animated using native Flash options, also remember that if you have tables or charts in your WMF, the Modify | Break Apart option may work better than ungrouping, although you might find that your chart is now a hundred small elements that you will have to manually select and group to create that whole chart again!
- Make sure you save your FLA file. In the next part of this tutorial, I'll show you how you can export the Flash file as an SWF that you can share with others.
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