Captivate 2017 and PowerPoint Import

The main thing you need to remember about Captivate and PowerPoint is that although you CAN begin a course in PPT and then import it into Captivate, the PPT does not actually get converted into Captivate objects on each slide.  The PPT slide pretty much just ends up being a static background to the Captivate slides.  You can use what Adobe calls "Roundtripping" to open and edit the PPT slides in either a Captivate environment, or else update the original PPT in PowerPoint and then update the changes into the Captivate project.

The downside of all of this is that it ties your hands quite significantly in terms of what you can do.  Unless you have an extremely compelling reason why your content needs to begin in PPT, the better approach by far is to ditch PPT completely and then just build from the ground up in Captivate.

I never use it neither, because I don't believe you can create engaging eLearning starting with a PPT. If you only want a converter to HTML for PPT, I would recommend a PPT plugin.

Yes, it is still available. Never used it, but it's there.