Image by Neto Leal

Powerpoint and Flash are both corporate whores and you’d assume that you could get them to do the same John. Unfortunately, they do not mix at all. Trying to fix this problem before your client catches a flight is negative fun, so here’s a quick hack. Embedding Flash directly is extremely dangerous as it messes up the timing of the Flash, and it can freeze up your presentation. What I did was link the Flash as an external file and add two lines of Actionscript to make it ‘behave’ like part of the presentation. You have to separate your files so they don’t corrupt each other, while at the same time appearing seamless. I should mention that adding a Flash intro to your file is no substitute for – say, eye contact and meaningful speech – but anyone reading this is prolly not in a position to say that. PS – this is boring for normal people, but hopefully it’ll save someone the three hours I wasted yesterday.

Why PowerPoint and Flash Don’t Mix

To put a movie or picture in Flash you do Insert/Whatever. For Flash however, you have to go through this extended rigamarole, which I won’t delve into. Powerpoint basically has a Flash player built in, and a crappy one at that. Running a program within a program is a very cludgy use of memory and it can freeze your whole kit. Within PowerPoint, my Flash file lost 5 seconds of music and was impossible to exit.

Linking to an External File

This is where the hack begins.

1. Put your .swf Flash file in the same folder as your presentation.
2. Create a line or a button that says ‘Play Intro’.
3. Right click the button thing and select ‘Action Settings’.
4. Select the ‘Hyperlink To’ option, and then choose ‘File’ from the dropdown
5. Browse and find your file

Then that’s it, clicking that button will open your Flash file. To be smart, you should also follow the same steps to create another button that says ‘Skip to Presentation’, linking to a Slide instead of a File (Step 4).

Actionscript

As is, the Flash file will open in a small window, which doesn’t look cool. It is also impossible to exit without doing a File/Quit. You can however, force Flash to open full screen, and enable it to close itself. One caveat however, Flash will show all the ugly stuff outside of the drawing frame when you go full screen. To prevent this I made a layer with a ‘mask’ around the edges so that all the photo edges and crap were hidden behind it. That mask is just a colored box with a hole in the middle for the content to peek through.

Force Full Screen: Right Click the frame and select ‘Actions’. Then copy this line into the Actionscript:

fscommand(“fullscreen”, “true”);

Or, hit the little Plus button and find the action you need: Global Functions/Browser Network/fsComma. Then use the drop down to add the Fullscreen command.

Enable Exit: By default the Flash will just end and your presenter will be stuck there. To escape this I made a big square on the very last frame, converted it to a symbol and did Right-Click/Actions and the following code:

on (release) {
fscommand(“quit”);
}

Or you can use the menus as above, that’s what I did. I don’t actually know Actionscript and I don’t like Flash in general.

Bugs

When you click the hyperlink Windows will ask you if you want to open the external file, it’s annoying. The big bug is that if you don’t include the linked file on the same folder on the presenters computer the whole thing will fail miserably. The Flash file must be on the physical disk in the right place cause it’s not embedded in the Powerpoint.

And blah blah blah, that is one way to stick Flash into a Powerpoint presentation. The effect is that you can transition between PPT and Flash in a few steps (3 total, including exit), so you can have your prettiness mixed with the actual presentation. These steps are also simple, mindless clicks rather than resizing windows and closing stuff. I should also mention that Powerpoint is actually pretty GD capable in terms of animations on its own, sans Flash.

I personally think Flash is almost always frivolous and useless, but I’ve learned to shut my mouth and cash the check. The problem with freelancing is that like 80% of the jobs don’t require creativity. In fact, they require doing exactly what the client says and shutting up, which I have problems with. That’s why I outsource half of the work now and just take a tithe. I also got a full set of Helvetica fonts out of the deal. My management skills are ass and my payroll is almost equal to income. Makes me a big tax turkey. This job, for example, was done in Montreal. I’m just taking 20% and all the phone calls. I think I may have gotten this outsourcing concept wrong.

Posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 in Friends, Personal, Tech.