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September 22, 2006
Powerpoint to FLA?
Powerpoint to FLA? heh... I've got a tech support question for you here. ;-) An old friend in the SF Bay Area multimedia community has been given a legacy Powerpoint presentation, which he needs to modularize and otherwise edit in the Flash Professional authoring environment. There are plenty of tools to write PPT to SWF, but the FLA format is (last time I checked) essentially a database dump from the app, and is quite difficult for other apps to read or write. Do you have any tips on working with PPTs in Flash? Conversions, workflows, other advice? All info appreciated, thanks!
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 22, 2006 11:52 AM
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You can use a .ppt to .swf converter, and then convert the .swf to a .fla usign ActionScript Viewer. It will generate the necessary .jsfl to automatically rebuild a .fla file from the assets and code in a .swf file.
It's pretty accurate too, I've had to use it for document recovery and was able to work with the recovered documented with minimal data loss... though it sucked hacing to re-organize the library again.
Posted by: darron at September 22, 2006 12:16 PM
Mental note -- spell check next time. :-)
Posted by: darron at September 22, 2006 12:17 PM
We've run into that a number of times at work. The biggest problem we've had though is that we need the resulting SWF to be nicely re-sizable. Nearly all of the PPT->SWF converters seem to convert to a bitmap and then drop it into a SWF. We've ended up exporting from PowerPoint as WMF files, then importing those into Flash. It's a long way from ideal, but it preserves most vector assets in the file.
Posted by: Aaron Leavitt at September 22, 2006 12:25 PM
In a couple of cases i've used PPT into Captivate and then captivate out to flash mx 2004. Captivate 2 will support flash 8 ide .fla format. -e
Posted by: eestes1 at September 22, 2006 12:59 PM
Tools like Articulate Presenter (http://www.articulate.com) are pretty damn flexible. I would say converting to flash just to edit inside the Flash IDE is probably overkill. The latest versions of PowerPoint can do a load of the things animation wise that Flash can do anyway. If it's so much work that you can't accomplish what you want inside of Powerpoint, then maybe it is easier just to recreate the thing in the Flash IDE anyway.
Posted by: Jesse Ezell at September 22, 2006 05:48 PM
I am sure you would know about Adobe Presenter (formerly Macromedia Breeze Presenter)
Posted by: Amit Agarwal at September 22, 2006 10:01 PM