Ever needed to convert a PowerPoint presentation to a Flash SWF file? Well, Open Office Impress is your solution!
Simply, open your PowerPoint file in Impress, choose to export the presentation. When the dialog box appears, change the file format to Macromedia Flash (SWF). Impress then creates a flash file that has all your slides and includes functionality to advance by clicking on a slide.
Impress does a fine job and for most people that would be good enough in most situations. A recent project the presentation flash file was almost 2 MB and I wasn’t satisfied with the usability of just clicking on the slide. I used SWF Decompiler to extract the SWF file into a FLA file that would allow me to customize the presentation.
Once inside the flash file, I removed the hidden layer that allowed the user to click on the presentation. Each slide takes up 3 key frames, I reduced the keyframes to one per slide, this will be helpful when using ActionScript to advanced the slides. In the first keyframe of the actions layer, include stop(); to prevent the presentation from animating through all the slides.
Just be aware that when you are using SWF Decomplier some graphics and/or text might get altered or blocked from being created.
I then created a simple Flash holder that has a loader and a control module to allow the user to click through the presentation and go fullscreen.
You can see this work in action at Curriculum Commons.
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