This tutorial will show you one way to move content from an existing PowerPoint presentation into Adobe Flash. You might want to add more sophisticated animation and interactivity to your presentation than PowerPoint offers, or you might want to make your presentation more "web-friendly." This tutorial will help you to move your existing PowerPoint slides so you can save time by not having to recreate your presentation from scratch in Flash. This method works best for presentations with a lot of slides and a lot of text that you don't want to retype and reformat in Flash.
This tutorial was created using PowerPoint 2000 and Flash 5.
We'll assume that you already have a complete PowerPoint that you want to use.
- Launch PowerPoint and open your presentation.
- In PowerPoint, select File> Save As.
- Define a folder to hold your presentation content.
- Select Windows Metafile (.wmf) from the dropdown list of possible file types. Press Save.
- A pop-up box displays in PowerPoint, asking if you want export every slide in the presentation. Click Yes.
Each slide is saved as a separate .wmf in the folder you defined.
PowerPoint transfers any text and any graphics on the slide to the WMF. It does not usually grab images or graphics that are located on the PowerPoint Slide Master. You'll have to recreate these in Flash or go to the Slide Master in PowerPoint after you're done and copy the images you want. Then, you can paste them into your Flash timeline.Now that we've saved our PowerPoint content into a format Flash can recognize, we'll move it into a Flash project.
- Launch Flash and open a new Flash project.
- Set up your movie properties to match the size of your PowerPoint (look at File>Page Setup in the PowerPoint presentation file to get the correct dimensions). If you want your Flash movie to be a different size than your PowerPoint, that's okay too. You'll just have to do some rescaling in Flash after importing your presentation .wmfs.
- Rename "Layer 1" to "Slides."
- Select Frame 1 in the Slides layer. Go to File> Import.
- Navigate to the folder holding your WMF files. Select Slide1.wmf and press Open.
The following pop-up window displays, asking if you want to import all images. Click Yes to import all of the slides.
Each of your slides is now in its own frame in the Slides layer.
Now, you have one slide per frame, but you don't want the movie to play straight through. We'll some buttons and some simple Actionscript to control the navigation.
- Create a layer called "ActionScript." Add a stop action to each frame of the timeline:
stop ();
[li]Create a layer called "Buttons." Pull a forwards, backwards, and home button to the stage from the Flash common library, or create new ones. Put all of the buttons on Frame 1 of the Buttons layer. Then, add a keyframe to the last frame of your movie--so your buttons will appear in all frames of your movie.[/li]
[li]Add this script to the next slide button:[/li]
on (release) {
nextFrame ();
}
[li]Add this script to the previous slide button:[/li]
on (release) {
prevFrame ();
}
[li]Add this script to the home button:[/li]
on (release) {
gotoAndPlay ("1");
}
[/list]
Now, test your movie. You should be able to see your content, and navigate between slides using your buttons.
Other fix-ups:
Once you have your most of your PowerPoint content into Flash, you might have to do a bit of cleaning up. You might want to reimport bitmap graphics (or, better yet recreate as vector drawings, so they can be scaled without losing quality.) You can also make your presentation more Flashlike, by adding animation or more interactivity with ActionScript or movie clips.
DaJawn.com
Author
