PowerPoint Notes

Cannot Insert Flash EXE Files

Question: I am looking for help inserting a Flash movie into my PowerPoint slide. My client sent me a movie with an EXE file extention and I have followed your directions correctly but I can not get it to play. Is there any way you can help me with this or point me in the right direction?

Answer: You need to ask your client to send you a SWF file — SWF files are actual Flash animation movies — the EXE file you received is most probably a Flash Projector file that includes the Flash runtime to run the movie and is essentially used for CD distribution. The original creator of the Flash movie can most certainly create a SWF output and send it to you so that you can insert it within a PowerPoint slide.

Categories: powerpoint, powerpoint_flash

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FlashPaper Documents in PowerPoint

Question: I have these Acrobat PDFs, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets that I need to be part of my PowerPoint presentation with all their formatting. But to do that I need to embed or link to those files — and most of the time I get the irritating security warning when I access them from within a PowerPoint show! Any better options or ideas?

Answer: That can be so irritating — and I do have an easy solution although it’s not free.

Look at Adobe’s FlashPaper program that allows you to print anything to a Flash SWF file — then insert those Flash SWFs inside PowerPoint slides. Since these are embedded within the slide, there are no warning dialog boxes — and you can even scroll, zoom, and pan these documents!

Tim Wilson sent me a couple of gotchas for this tip:

1. Set up the printing properties for FlashPaper to use a custom paper size. In Windows, you do this through Control Panel > Printers and Faxes. Make the paper size slightly larger than your image. If you don’t do this, FlashPaper will chop your image up into separate pages!
2. Leave space on your PowerPoint slide for users to click, to advance the slide show away from your Flashpaper slide. Perhaps include a ‘Continue’ label people can click on. If your FlashPaper object covers the whole slide, your users won’t be able to navigate away from the slide.

If you need to know how you can insert Flash SWFs in PowerPoint, look here…
Categories: powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, pdf, tutorials

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Graphic Elements for PowerPoint

Question: Can you suggest any good software to create a stunning graphic element for my PowerPoint. I would like to try using 3D shapes instead of PowerPoint shapes.

Answer: Look at PowerPoint’s 3D engine — it is surprisingly powerful although not in the class of a 3D program. Another option is to download the public beta of Office 2007 — the graphic engine is stunning.

Alternatively, do what professional presentation designers do all the time — use Photoshop as a companion to PowerPoint!

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Output Notes from PowerPoint

I’m looking for a way to output my PowerPoint notes alone, or a presentation without the metafile overhead. I need the slides plus the notes – or even a way to get the notes without anything else. You’ll need to have Microsoft Word installed on your system in addition to Microsoft PowerPoint for this trick to work:

1. Open your presentation and choose File Send to Microsoft (Office) Word.
2. Select the Notes next to slides option, and click OK.
3. Microsoft Word creates a table with slide thumbnails and notes. Delete the unnecessary column in the resulting Word table that includes the thumbnails – to do that, select the entire column, right-click and choose Delete Columns.
4. Choose Table Convert Table to Text… Choose your text separator (or choose a custom separator).

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Pause Slides, Sounds, and Movies – and Resume!

Is it possible to pause the slide show AND the music simultaneously? I want to be able to stop on a particular slide and talk about it with the music OFF, then start the next slide and have the music resume playing. If there is a way to do this Microsoft sure doesn’t make it clear how. Thanks.

That’s certainly possible – and this also works with any movies in the presentation. Most laptops (and even keyboards these days) have a Mute button or hotkey – press that to mute the sound. To resume, you’ll have to press the Mute button or hotkey again.

To pause both the presentation and sound at the same time, press the Pause key on your keyboard – to resume, press Pause again.

In the same way if you don’t want the slide to be visible while playing press W or B to see a white or black screen that also pause music and video – to resume from that point onwards, press W or B again!

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