To create a compelling animation, you need more than PowerPoint's limited toolset; you need something more powerful.
Macromedia Flash is a popular animation tool that allows you to create animations from scratch.
Go to Mcromedia at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/ to download the Flash player or get a free trial version of Flash.
For screen recording, you can use Techsmith’s Camtasia, Macromedia’s Captivate, and Debugmode's Wink to create Flash-format movies of running software.
PowerPoint supports Flash (.SWF is the Shockwave file format used by Flash), but using it on a slide is not as seamless as using Windows Media files (.WMF).
Embedding the animation in a slide gives a more seamless presentation than linking to an .SWF file from a slide and playing the clip in the Flash player.
What To Do To Use a Flash (.SWF) file in PowerPoint
- In Normal View, open the slide on which you want to play a Flash movie animation.
- Click Toolbars on the View menu, and then click Control Toolbox.
- Click More Controls (the button with the hammer and wrench icon), and scroll down and click Shockwave Flash Object.
- On the slide, drag the mouse pointer to draw a rectangle into which you will insert the Shockwave Flash Object control.
- Resize the control by dragging the sizing handles. If you want the movie to cover the entire slide, size the rectangle to reach the edges of the slide.
- Right-click the Shockwave Flash Object, and then click Properties.
- On the Alphabetic tab, select the Movie property.
- In the blank cell next to Movie, type the Flash file’s full drive path including the file name (for example, C\:My Documents\MyFile.swf) or the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the Flash file that you want to play.
- In the Properties dialog box, set the options for how the animation plays as follows:
- To play the file automatically when the slide is displayed, set the Playing property to True.
- If the Flash file has a Start/Rewind control built into it, set Playing to False.
- To play the file only once, in the Loop property, select False.
- If you distribute your presentation via CD or email, in the EmbedMovie property, select True.
*Note:* The Shockwave Flash Object control must be installed on any computer that runs the presentation.
- Close the Properties box.
Your slide now looks similar to this in Normal view, with an icon of the movie object below the slide title:
When you run the slide show and play the movie, it looks like this:
- To view the animation, select View Show on the Slide Show menu.
Experiment with the placement and size of your embedded movie on the slide. You can overlay titles or other text on the movie by adding a text box atop the object control. The text shows when you begin the movie, and then disappears on the second frame.
Note: The Shockwave Flash Object control (Flash Player) must be installed on any computer on which you run your presentation.
Go to Macromedia to download and install the Flash Player.
