Using PowerPoint Presentations

If there can be said to be a corporate presentation standard, it would be Microsoft's PowerPoint. Used by everyone from grade-school students to the captains of industry, the odds are you will eventually be asked if a PowerPoint presentation can be used in your Captivate movie. The answer is yes. In fact, you can use the entire presentation or individual slides from the presentation in your Captivate movie.

The advantage to you, the developer, is you now have access to content that already exists. This is a potentially huge productivity boost, because you don't have to re-create or repurpose the content for use in your movie.

In previous version of PowerPoint, you could import only a PowerPoint filewith the .ppt extensioninto the movie. Captivate expands this so now you can import both PPT and PPS (PowerPoint slide show) files into your movie.

To import a PowerPoint presentation

1.	With a movie open, select either the Slide View or Edit View panel.
2.	Select Insert > PowerPoint Slide to open the Insert PowerPoint Slides dialog box (Figure 3.19). Figure 3.19. PowerPoint slides can be imported into a Captivate movie.
3.	Click the Browse button to navigate to the folder containing the PPT or PPS file.
4.	Select where the imported slide(s) should be placed in the Captivate movie and click OK. You will see a dialog box"Extracting thumbnail images"that shows a progress bar tracking the process of converting the PowerPoint Slide to a series of thumbnail images (Figure 3.20). Figure 3.20. Extracting slides from a PowerPoint Presentation. After the progress bar is complete, the Insert Slides dialog box opens (Figure 3.21). This dialog box contains a thumbnail representation of each slide in the PowerPoint presentation. Figure 3.21. The Insert Slides dialog box enables you to select the slides from the PowerPoint presentation to be inserted into the movie.
5.	Click the check box in the upper right corner of each slide you want to import.
6.	Click again to deselect it (Figure 3.22). Click the Finish button to import the selected slides into your movie. Figure 3.22. Clicking the check box tells captivate which slides will be imported into the movie. The Importing PowerPoint Presentation dialog box opens. When the import is finished, the box closes and the selected slides are added to your movie (Figure 3.23). Figure 3.23. The imported PowerPoint slides are added to the movie.

Tip

• The default behavior for importing PowerPoint slides is to import all of the slides in the presentation. This explains why the Select All button in the Import Slides dialog box is grayed out. If you want to import only certain slides, click the Clear All button to deselect all of the slides.