Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Two Free Methods to Convert PowerPoint to Swf

Converting PowerPoint to Flash would absolutely be a good choice to distribute your bulky PowerPoint Presentation.

You can do the whole PowerPoint-to-Flash conversion manually or with related free software according to the following two methods:

Method I:

If you don’t have Flash you might need a free program called MotionSWF and PowerPoint although you don’t even need PowerPoint as any presentation app that outputs the presentation as a series of .jpg or .png slides will work.

1. Inside PowerPoint Export as a JPG by opening the presentation then hitting File&gtSave as (Pick JPEG) and when it asks to export every frame say yes. PPT will then create a new folder with each slide as a JPG. Note Flash does not import WMF correctly. The only tool I have found outside of those made by MS, who created the format, that does is WMF Companion. Exporting as a WMF sequence from PPT and then re-importing will seriously mess up your work in many situations (mostly with text). If you did not use any text you may want to export as WMF as they will scale while a raster output tends to pixilate when scaled.

2. Now you have only had to click import and choose Slide1 and then Flash will ask you if you want to import all the Images as a Sequence. All your slides are now in Flash. Alternatively if you own Flash MX you could turn your Image Sequence into an AVI and import it as Video.

3. If you do not own Flash 5/MX and do not have an app that can import a sequence then a very simple piece of freeware can convert any Image Sequence into a SWF called Motion SWF is available http://ra.sakura.ne.jp/~taos/moswf/ You will need a SWF Authoring tool that either supports AS (KM, 3DFA, LM2) or Tell Target (SWiSH) to stop and start each frame in your animation if desirable. Likewise if your app will import SWF then you could just import the SWF.

4. In order to use Motion SWF open it and drag the created slide folder into the application. Click the movie button and you can set the frame speed. If you set Frames to 1 your presentation will play at 1 FPS, which is suitable for many slideshows.

But if you want your PPT Text effects preserved this will not work.

Method II:

First, you'll need to prepare the PowerPoint files. Make sure you are not using any complicated gradients or animations. These will be interpreted poorly when they are brought into Flash. Also, make sure there are no objects that fall outside the confines of the slide area. This will ensure that all the slides align correctly when they are imported to Flash. Now, save a copy of your presentation without any background images. You may want to also choose a contrasting background color to easily see the content of each slide. You all import the background images into Flash at a later time.

Second, choose File > Save As... from your PowerPoint document and save the presentation as a Windows Metafile (*.wmf). This will save your entire presentation as a sequence of files. WMF files keep all text.

Next, create a new Flash Document and resize the Stage to 720 x 540. Change the background color to black. Choose File > Import > Import to Stage... and import the first WMF file. When asked to import all of the images in the sequence, choose Yes. This will place each slide from your presentation onto a sequence of frames.

Then, create a new layer under the slides layer and import the images to use for your background. You'll probably need two images, one for title slides and one for the regular slides.

Now it's time for some manual labor. You'll need to go through every frame of the movie and delete the solid background shape from your slides layer. Once this is complete, you should see the content of each slide with the correct background image behind it.

Finally, add a frame to the end of your movie. Place some static text on that frame that says something like "End of slideshow, click to exit."

Alright, now it's time to move on to some ActionScript. Create a new layer for your actions. There are a few statements you'll need to include right away.
First, you want this movie to play full screen so add an fscommand.
fscommand("fullscreen","true")-;
To make sure the Stage resizes correctly specify the scaleMode.
Stage.scaleMode = "exactFit";
Finally, you don't want the movie to begin playing through all the slides right away before the user starts clicking, so add a stop function.
stop();
You'll need to include some functions that will be used frequently to navigate the presentation.
function gotoNextSlide():Void {
if (_currentframe <>Next, we need to handle all the keyboard and mouse events so that the user can navigate through the slides. We'll do this by creating a new listener object.
var myListener:Object = new Object();
myListener.onKeyDown = myOnKeyDown;
myListener.onKeyUp = myOnKeyUp;
Key.addListener(myListener);
myListener.onMouseUp = myOnMouseUp;
Mouse.addListener(myListener);-Here are the listener functions.
function myOnKeyDown():Void {
if (Key.isDown(Key.DOWN) || Key.isDown(Key.PGDN)) {
gotoNextSlide();
} else if (Key.isDown(Key.UP) || Key.isDown(Key.PGUP)) {
gotoPreviousSlide();
} else if (Key.isDown(Key.END)) {
gotoEnd();
} else if (Key.isDown(Key.HOME)) {
gotoHome();
}
}

function myOnKeyUp():Void {
if (Key.getCode() == 27) {
quit();
}
}
function myOnMouseUp():Void {
gotoNextSlide();
}
zoundryIf the steps below is too complicated to you, you can try some PowerPoint to Flash converters. Some free office applications like OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) offers the output as SWF file, but without animations and effects.

Which one do you prefer? That's your choice!

Now,on the web free PowerPoint to SWF converter can also be found,such as authorPOINTTM Lite Free PowerPoint to Flash Converter for PPS, PPT to SWF

Download the files used in the method I.
Download (1146 kb)
Get conversion and unzipping tools for PC and Mac here!

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