1. Using Flash Animations In PowerPoint
Note: This presentation requires the Flash 4 viewer be installed on your system.
Available as a free download from:
cathleen belleville a bit better corporation

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Problems & Issues must have flash 4 player installed
free download from
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

6. 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

7. thank you cathy belleville & the screenbeans a bit better corporation