Convert PowerPoint to Flash Manually (Part 1) in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

If you read the title of the page above, one word that stands apart is "manually". Let us explain why. Look around this site, or search online and you'll run into tens (maybe hundreds) of PowerPoint to Flash converters that plug into PowerPoint and create some semblance of Flash presentations for you with one click. Some of them do an awesome job, and even those may not do all things perfectly all the time.

If you have the time, and if you are familiar with Adobe Flash, then there's another way of doing this conversion, and that's doing it manually! This approach lets you tweak, change, and edit the content as you deem fit. There's tons of stuff you can do with any slide object within the Adobe Flash interface, and this is not really a tutorial on how to go into any such advanced stuff. However, this tutorial will get you started!

This tutorial involves two programs: Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Flash. First, we'll show you how to proceed with the PowerPoint part of this tutorial.

Saving PowerPoint Slides as WMF

1. Open your presentation in PowerPoint. For this tutorial, we used the Earth Day presentation that you can download from this site.
2. PowerPoint 2007 users can click the Office button and choose Save As | Other Formats, as shown in Figure 1, below. Users of previous PowerPoint versions can choose the File | Save As option.
3. 
   Figure 1: Save As
3. Either way, you bring up the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 2, below. Choose the destination folder, and in the Save as type drop-down list, choose Windows Metafile (*.WMF), and click the Save button.
4. 
   Figure 2: Save As dialog box

Bitmaps and Vectors

WMF is a vector format, and Flash accepts all vector formats. These WMF files can be resized without losing their resolution.

Learn more about the difference between vector and bitmap graphics.
4. Doing so brings up a message window asking if you want to export every slide or just the current slide, as shown in Figure 3, below. Choose Every Slide button to export all the slides.
5. 
   Figure 3: Every Slide
5. Once these slides are exported, PowerPoint opens a message window stating the folder where the slide WMFs have been saved.
6. 
   Figure 4: PowerPoint Message
6. Figure 5, below, shows the folder containing all the sequentially numbered WMF files. You'll find a WMF for each slide in your source presentation.
7. 
   Figure 5: Sequentially numbered WMF files
7. In the next part of this tutorial, we'll show you how to import these WMFs inside Adobe Flash.

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