Sunday, May 31, 2009

The Wonders of OpenOffice.org


Open Office is great if you have Powerpoint Presentations, and you want to convert them into Flash SWF's that can be added to a web page.

Open Office is free and can be downloaded from here:
Click Here for Open Office Download Page

To convert a Powerpoint presentation, click on "Presentation" on the Open Office welcome screen. It is then a matter of browsing to your powerpoint and opening it up in Open Office :



This should bring the PPT into the presentation editor. To make the Flash SWF, all we have to do is do File > Export > (name of our file) and then change the "file format" output type from the default .xpm to Flash .swf, simply by clicking the drop down list of format types.

We will then have a SWF file produced like this one here:
(Click on the current slide below to advance to next slide).




The only drawback is that in the Flash version, we do not have all the slide transition effects of the original PowerPoint.

If you would like to download a copy of the above PowerPoint presentation, (in MS PPT 2003 format) then click the link below:
View the above "Fireworks" Presentation in PPT

If you would like to download a copy of the above Powerpoint presentation, (in Adobe PDF format) then click the link below:
View the PowerPoint Presentation as a PDF

If you are wondering how we inserted the SWF flash file into a blog; well that sounds like a good idea for my next post.



Enjoy,
Passy