Jo Wozniak

Former VMIL Consultant

Embedding a Shockwave document into Microsoft PowerPoint is a bit tricky and involves numerous steps.  Shockwave animations enliven static power point presentations and make them more dynamic.  Often people are visual learners and presenting information in a visual format enhances understanding of difficult material for many.  This document outlines the procedure to make file placement successful.

General Information

• Always remember to enable macros 
• If using Powerpoint2000 on a win2000 system click in the gray area of an open document to bring up the box that enables the macros
• It is useful to entitle all slides with a flash document as such for easier management 
• Never click inside the area where a flash file is embedded - flash tries to take over powerpoint this way and no navigation commands will work during the presentation
• a flash animation is considered an active X object in powerpoint
• know the location of your shockwave (.swf) file (e.g. c:\workspace\*.swf) - this will need to be typed in as there is no browser to search for files

Procedure

1. Open up an existing powerpoint document in which you want to place the flash animation or create a new one.
2. Go to the View pull down menu and select Toolbars->Control Toolbox
3. A new window should pop up.    Select the hammer and wrench icon in the lower right hand corner.  Another window should pop up:  .  Select Shockwave Flash object from the list.
4. The cursor should turn into crosshairs when placed on top of the powerpoint file.   Click and drag a box to designate an area in which the flash animation will be placed  .  This box can be resized later if necessary
5. Right click in the box to bring up properties.    A new option box should pop up  .  Click in the (Custom) box in the top left to enable this option.  A little box with dots (...) will appear in the right hand side row.  Click on this to open up another dialog box.  .  In this box you specify where your flash animation is currently located  . Type in the name of the flash file in the Movie URL box.  (Unfortunately, no "browse" feature exists so know the location before doing this step.)  It is a good idea to keep the flash files in the same directory as the powerpoint file.  
6. Disable the Play and Loop options in this dialog box.  Another way to change this is to bring up the drop down menus in the Properties dialog box  .  Change Loop and Playing options to "False".  This will provide more control of the flash animation during the powerpoint presentation.
   
   
7. Every slide in PowerPoint has a unique identifier.  For a flash animation to play properly in the presentation it needs to have a certain code.  To bring up the code dialog box, double click with the left hand mouse button 
   
8. Code can be found on the web on the Microsoft site but basically looks like the following:.  
9. Remember to change the Slide number to coincide with your presentation.  
10. To have full control over the flash animation during the presentation buttons can be created for play and a rewind functions.  To do this, go to the Autoshape menu at the bottom left of the powerpoint window  and choose Action Button-> custom  .  A crosshair will appear with which a box can be drawn to act as a button.  Once the button is drawn, right click to bring up the button properties to set the button operation macro.  
    To hide the buttons so they are seamless with the rest of the presentation change the property color to "no color" and position the boxes where they make the most sense in the presentation.  This way, clicking on the ("play" and "rewind" in this example) buttons that have just been created gives more control over playing the Flash animation.  The Flash animation will always open to the state in which it was left so it is a good idea to always rewind before the real presentation.

Imaging Technology Group
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
405 N. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801

Date Issued: 21 May 2001

Copyright © 2001, Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, All Rights Reserved.