PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials

Putting Flash animation in PowerPoint

Follow these steps to put a Flash movie in your PowerPoint presentation for awesome animation. (Thanks to Rick Turoczy for the basics, which I've added to. See his version.)

1. Write down the location of the SWF file you want to use.
2. Choose View>Toolbars>Control Toolbox.
3. Click the Hammer button (More Controls).
4. Choose Shockwave Flash Object from the menu.
5. Drag a box across the screen to get the desired size and location.
6. Right click the box and choose Properties.
7. In the Properties window, click the top line, Custom. Then click the ellipsis at the right.
8. In the Property Pages dialog box, type the location of the SWF file that you wrote down earlier. Use the full path.
9. Set the other parameters, if you wish, for example, Quality: best; Scale: show all; Window: window.
10. Click Embed movie if you want to make sure it’s always included with the PP presentation.
11. Click OK.
12. Close the Properties window using its close box.
13. Choose Slide Show view to see the movie. If your movie didn’t appear in Normal view, it will appear when you return to Normal view after running the slide show.

There is a well-known bug that automatically changes the Playing property to False if the Flash movie is not set to loop. Here are two solutions to this problem:

Save the presentation as a PowerPoint Show
This is the simplest method.

1. Reset the Playing property of the SWF file(s) to True. To do this, select the Shockwave Flash object, right click it and choose Properties. On the Playing row, click so you see a drop-down arrow, then click the arrow and choose True.
2. Save the presentation as a Show. First save your presentation, then choose File > Save As. From the Save as Type drop-down list, choose PowerPoint Show (*.pps). Keep the same file name and click Save.

From now on you can play the presentation by opening the .pps file and the Flash movie will always play. 

Create some Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code to control the Playing property
This method is more complex but lets you present from the original presentation file. Use this method if others will modify the PowerPoint presentation.

Follow the same steps to insert the Flash movie. After step 10, uncheck the Loop checkbox. Now follow these steps to create the VBA code:

1. On the Control Toolbox toolbar, click the View Code button. The Microsoft Visual Basic window opens.
2. Choose Insert > Module.
3. In the main window, enter the following code, where the number in the 3rd line after the word "Slides" is the number of the slide containing the Flash movie. (Thanks to Christopher Contois at www.2cinteractive.com for reminding me of this point. Don't forget to customize the slide number!)
4. That's it! Return to your presentation and play it through in slide show view to test it.

Sub OnSlideShowPageChange()
Dim obj As ShockwaveFlash
Set obj = _ ActivePresentation.Slides(2).Shapes("ShockwaveFlash1").OLEFormat.Object
obj.Playing = True
obj.Rewind
obj.Play
End Sub

(Note: If you put lines 3 and 4 on the same line, omit the underscore.)

As you can see, the code simply sets the Playing property to true, rewinds the movie, and plays it.

Note: if you want more than one Flash movie in a presentation, you need to give additional movies unique shape names in the 4th line of the code. The 2nd one could be "ShockwaveFlash2" for example. Then, in the Properties window, give the object the same name in the Name row (which is just under the Custom row).

Next, go to the slide containing the Flash movie. From the Drawing toolbar, insert a blank Action Button. In the Action Settings dialog box that opens, choose the Run Macro option, choose the macro from the drop-down list (“OnSlideShowPageChange” in the previous example), and click OK. With the action button still selected, type some text on the button, such as “Play Movie” to label the button. Now, whenever you need to play the movie in slide show view, you can simply click the button.

Your macro security settings may stop the VBA code from running. Make sure it isn't set to high. (Tools > Options > Security > Macro Security.) In addition, coding in the Flash file itself may stop the movie from playing.

My thanks to the following people for the information about creating non-looping Flash movies: Jane Horb, who researched this issue and spent a lot of time going over this issue with me, Paul Hewitt, who came up with the technique of saving the presentation as a PowerPoint show (.pps file), Meg Wyrwas, and the following Support people at Microsoft: John Slack, Rich Porter, and Jeff Qiu.

Christopher Contois notes that you should be careful about the 4th line of code because it hard codes the slide number (2 in the example). Therefore, if you move that slide or add or delete slides before it, you need to remember to change the slide number.

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