Using Flash Animations In PowerPoint

cathleen belleville a bit better corporation www.bitbetter.com

Note: This presentation requires the Flash 4 viewer be installed on your system.

Available as a free download from: www.macromedia.com

What the Heck is Flash?

vector based animation product from Macromedia native file format is Flash exports movies to animated gif, quicktime, avi in bitmapped format exports movies to shockwave (swf) in vector format, excellent compression with antialiasing hard to learn, but not as bad as Director good on-line tutorial & good help street price: $280 new/$120 upgrade mac and windows versions, shared file format

Why use Flash & Shockwave?

Vector-based animation: looks good at any size much smaller files than gifs powerpoint loops all animated gifs very precise controls, including buttons, starts & stops gif files aliased to specific background color--easy to change in flash

Adding Shockwave Animation

view/toolbars/visual basic click on control toolbox button (hammer & wrench) click on more controls button (hammer & wrench) drag out placeholder for animation right-click to bring up properties of animation: – movie: enter full path: c:\windows\desktop\foo.swf

– height: enter in pixels – width: enter in pixels – embed movie: true if you want movie to stay with pres.

– loop: set to true or false, true is default

Problems & Issues

must have flash 4 player installed – free download from www.macromedia.com

powerpoint plays all flash animations on top layer – no full page animations if you want text too!

important to set size in vba object properties resizing can cause strange things to happen, or not!

slides with swf files display as all black when saved to web click “true” to embed movie setting if you want the animations to travel with the presentation

Problems & Issues, cont.

files placed on master will play continuously from slide to slide powerpoint can’t recognize any mouse clicks made while mouse is on top of flash object looped files do no reset themselves back to frame one workaround: • in flash, set movie as not looping • at last frame, insert an action that goes to frame 2 • in powerpoint, set loop to false

thank you

cathy belleville & the screenbeans a bit better corporation www.bitbetter.com