FlashPPT

FlashPPT is about using animation techniques and Flash together in PowerPoint, and also exporting to rich media formats from PowerPoint.

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Wednesday, July 30, 2008, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 8:24 am

We recently did a review on Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional on Indezine.com.

This review was based on the FlashPPT Evaluate benchmark presentation — here are the individual scores:

Product Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional 5.0.0.14
Review Date July 10th 2008

Feature Score Maximum
Bullets and Bullet Levels 5 5
Animated Bullets 5 5
Pictures (and Picture Rotation) 5 5
Animated Picture 5 5
Picture with Alpha Channel 5 5
Linked Picture 5 5
Clip Art and Clip Art, Recolored 5 5
Clip Art, Animated and Rotated 5 5
Shapes, Fills, and Lines without transparency 4 5
Shapes, Fills, and Lines with transparency 5 5
Shapes, Fills, and Lines with entry animations 3 5

Overlapping text boxes with transparency

5 5
Geometry and mutual positioning of shapes, arrows and text boxes 5 5
Geometry and mutual positioning of slide objects – alignment 5 5
Text formatting 5 5
Animations and transitions 2 5
Embedded Flash movie 3 5
Linked movie clip 4 5

Background music and transition sounds

5 5
Narration 5 5

Other Scores Score Maximum
Interface 7 10
PowerPoint 2007 Support 7 10
Help and Support 3 10
Output 7 10
Price 6 10

Total 118 150
Percentage 78.6 100

Note: All scores are provided by the Indezine test team, and are the opinion of the individual tester — all results are double-checked and the reviews go through a QC process.

Filed Under: Add-in, Evaluate, Flash, PowerPoint, PPT2Flash, Review, Score, Wondershare

1 Comment


Wednesday, April 2, 2008, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 1:45 pm

Here’s one of the typical questions I have been asked about no longer being able to embed Flash movies in PowerPoint 2007:

I’ve been working with inserting Flash movies in PowerPoint without any problems in PowerPoint 2003, but since upgrading to 2007 I’ve not been able to embed a single Flash movie! PowerPoint 2007 poses no problems in getting the Shockwave Flash object into the PowerPoint slide, and it even allows me to set the embed option to True, but the fact is that the Flash file does not embed at all — it does not travel with the PowerPoint presentation. This makes sharing impossible — have you run into this issue, or know any workarounds?

There’s no official word on this yet as to what is causing the issue, but it is clear that PowerPoint 2007 is preventing the embedding of a Flash movie — maybe this is due to enhanced security controls in this version — or it could be due to some other reason.

You can still continue using PowerPoint 2003 to create presentations with embedded Flash movies. If you must use PowerPoint 2007, you could make sure that the Flash movie and the PowerPoint presentation are in the same folder — and then copy the entire folder if you need to move the presentation to another computer.

Filed Under: PowerPoint
Tagged as: , , ,

8 Comments


Saturday, October 27, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 10:00 am

We have a review program for PowerPoint to Flash add-ins that are benchmarked using our Evaluate presentation.

Here are scores for some of these add-ins:

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Add-in
Tagged as: ,

No Comments


Wednesday, October 3, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 4:47 pm

There are scores of PowerPoint to Flash converters out there, and they all do some things right, and they all have their problem areas. In such a scenario, it’s difficult to rank them all. So I decided on a points system, and created a benchmark presentation. This benchmark presentation has 24 slides, and I provide 5 points for each slide for a total of 120 points.

Benchmark Slide 03  Benchmark Slide 07  Benchmark Slide 09

Benchmark Slide 12  Benchmark Slide 14   Benchmark Slide 16  

Benchmark Slide 18   Benchmark Slide 22   Benchmark Slide 23

And then I provide another 80 points for:

  • Program interface (10 points)
  • Support options (10 points)
  • Output (10 points)
  • LMS options (10 points)
  • Integration with quizzing features (10 points)
  • Output to a non-Flash format (5 points)
  • Output to Flash based screen savers and EXEs (5 points)
  • PowerPoint 2007 compatibility (10 points)
  • Pricing (10 points)

This gets me the score for the product — anything up to 200 points. Then I convert this score to percentage points. Watch out soon to see how the different converter products score.

And the benchmark presentation is not available as a free download now, although you can request access through the feedback form.

Benchmark Presentation for PowerPoint to Flash Conversion

Filed Under: PowerPoint
Tagged as: , , ,

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Thursday, September 20, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 6:42 pm

Rhys JeremiahRhys Jeremiah has been working in IT after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in mathematics. He started writing database applications for a large insurance company and quickly moved into web development, the largest site for a major international motor manufacturer. Although now teaching mathematics, he still manages some IT work. He currently lives in Cardiff, Wales with Sarah, his wife, and their children Lloyd and Carys.

Geetesh: Tell us more about your Extract Flash product, and what inspired you to create this.

Rhys: As is often common, the reason for creating the Extract Flash product was to solve a problem that could have easily been avoided. The company I was working for at the time was a major client of a marketing firm here in the UK. Last thing on a Friday afternoon, we were asked to update a flash file on a website and that the replacement file would be winging its way to us via email very soon. None of us in the office were quite prepared for the fact that the file had been placed into a PowerPoint presentation. It seemed that the last thing the marketing company did before the weekend was to send that file as numerous phone calls to get the original file failed. So we had a problem.

I noticed that it was possible to drag and drop the embedded Flash object between Office products and even drop it onto the desktop as a scrap file (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138275). So I reasoned that the file must contain the Flash file that we were searching for. Hence it was worth digging a bit deeper. On opening the scrap file in a binary editor, I was able to locate the header block of the SWF file and without too much effort it was the possible to pull the binary data out and write it back to disk. The reason I wrote an application to do this is that I enjoy the challenge of trying something new, and also providing a useful tool to the community. In theory the scrap approach would work for any type of embedded object so long as the header block could be read and processed. With a small amount of knowledge it would be possible to change the file to search a binary file for any header block and extract the embedded data. From memory I think that SWF files are held in PowerPoint files without encryption so you don’t necessarily need to mess about with the scrap file.

Geetesh: Many people believe that their embedded Flash content in a PowerPoint slide is secure — so this does prove them wrong. How important is it for them to be aware of this, and would the scrap approach also work with any other embedded content in Microsoft Office documents.

Rhys: From my experience many people think that all embedded files in Office documents are secure. I can’t count how many times someone has sent me a Word document containing loads of images. I’ve never really considered the people actually use this method to protect their files. It’s certainly naive to approach security in this fashion. Personally I think that the only way to secure your sensitive data is not to give it away, as soon as you release any information you lose the ability to control the distribution. If you really want to secure your embedded content don’t embed it.

Filed Under: Embed, Extract, Flash, PowerPoint

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