Flash and PowerPoint

[Irina]

I worked on a project for the last 6 months. Customer just now reviewing the
product and one of the issues is that they are not able to view flash files
that are embedded into PP. I suggested to them to download Flash Player 10
from Adobe web site, since this is how we fixed some of our machines that
didn't have Flash installed. But the customer is a government agency and they
are not allowed to download anything to their computers. The thing is that I
am sure they do have flash plug-in that came with IE (which they are using IE
6). I just need to know is there a way to make PP play Flash without
downloading Flash Player 10. It probably has something to do with Active X.
Please help. I can't imagine re-animating 6 months of work in PowerPoint.

 

[Ellen Finkelstein]

Hmmm, they may also have Active X disabled in IE. Others may have some more
technical advice about this, but I can think of one solution, which is to use
Camtasia or a similar product to capture the animation and save it as an MPG
or AVI file, then insert that. Flash in PowerPoint often runs into problems
like this, and your client may be distributing the presentation to people
with all sorts of versions of IE, PowerPoint, and the Flash Player.

Ellen

 

[Irina]

Yeah you are right. The problem is that those are interactive files, so all
interactivity is going to be lost once converted into video format. I have
tested PP with friends who had Flash player 9 and it didn't work. So, I guess
the issue is in the difference of Active X. I use latest one. Friends use
previouse one. Who knows what the customer uses, they are still sitting on IE
6.

 

[Ellen Finkelstein]

Just thinking here. I'm wondering why you're using PowerPoint at all if
you're building interactivity into Flash. Perhaps just save in an earlier
version of flash, use ActionScript 2 instead of 3 (if that's what you did)
and give them plain SWF files? Would that work? They should be able to play
those directly in IE.

Ellen

 

[Tom]

Maybe it's worth looking at the PPT2HTML application available at
http://www.pptools.com/ppt2html/index.html

I've been using the demo version and am very impressed. It converts the PPT
to a very good quality end product that runs in the browser instead of in
PPT. I'd suggest you try the demo - just be sure to look at Slick Tricks to
get instructions for making Flash work correctly. Since it retains your
original SWF, the interactivity should be OK. Other tricks about preloading
are also very helpful and it all works well - at least it does in IE 6 and
IE7 (once you allow Active X) but have not tried it in other browsers. The
app outputs everything to a folder on your PC then, when you're satisfied,
just use your favorite FTP app to put it on a server.


Might be worth a try. If it works, it's modestly priced to buy it.

Good luck.