Importin PowerPoint

Forum|Forum|18 years ago
November 2, 2007
2 replies
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I would like to know, is it possible to import PowerPoint slides to Captivate project so, that text remains text? Offcourse I can copy-paste text slide by slide, but I have too meny of them...

How about interactivity in PowerPoint slides? what happens to Buttons and hyperlinks and so on.

Import export

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docedoc

Known Participant

I'll let you know when it's ready. It is proving interesting.

docedoc

Known Participant

Here is a way to import PowerPoint (PPT) slides into Captivate and end up with editable slide titles and body text. The process, which I'll call migration to disitnguish it from Captivate import, isn't trivial but it certainly beats cutting and pasting text captions individually.

In overview, the approach is: import the slides, create placeholder text captions for title and body, export the captions, update the captions using an outline that PPT creates, and import the updated captions.

While this is not particularly difficult, it does require a working knowledge of Captivate, Word, and PPT . If you want to automate updating the captions, you must also know how to create a Word Visual Basic for Applications module, copy code into the module, and run a macro.

I'm migrating many large PPT files to Captivate and needed to end up with a project with the content of the source (text, audio, images, slide notes) as editable objects and be able to apply slide and title masters to the Captivate slides.

My goal is to use Captivate to maintain and extend the lessons rather than having to go back to PPT to change text or the like. Alas, the procedure described here does not automatically import images and audio -- a task on which I'm still working. However, it does speed the process of creating a Captivate project that is ready for importing images and audio. (As a test I migrated a 135 slide PPT file to editable text captions in about 10 minutes. Using a manual approach would have taken hours. Note that I'm not recommending this many slides in a Captivate file; I used the 135 slide PPT file to test migration speeds.)

The steps below differ from those I described in a prevous post -- the differences made it easier to for me to write VBA code to automate the update.

Create the outline, update Heading styles in AdobeCaptivate.dot and import the slides:

1) Using PPT send the outline to Word (File > Send to > Microsoft Office Word > Outline only) and then add one blank title slide and one regular slide as the first two slides in the PPT file. Doing so will create slide and title master backgrounds when you import. Save the modified file and exit PPT.

2) Using Word, format the Heading 1 through Heading 9 styles in AdobeCaptivate.dot, which is typically in this folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 2. Mimic the format of the PPT slide master's title and body text in terms of font, indent, and bullets. Save and close AdobeCaptivate.dot. (You can skip this step if you don't care about the resulting text format or want to change the format within Captivate. Also, you need to complete this step only once, unless you want to future migrations to have a different format. If you publish Handouts they shouldn't be affected, since Captivate does not uses Heading 1-9 in handouts. But, to be safe, consider backing up the original AdobeCaptivate.dot prior to editing it.)

3) Switch to Captivate and import all slides from PPT, including the two blank slides. (In Captivate V3 select: Import slides as background image, and Advance slides automatically. This simplifies the resulting file. Besides, you'll probably want to recreate PPT animations in Captivate so you can control the animation timing.)

Assign master backgrounds to slides:

1) The library will contain many backgrounds. Rename the first two backgrounds, which came from the two blank slides, changing them to be _TitleMaster and _Slide Master. (You can use any names you wish, including the original names, but these names make them easy to recognize and they sort to the top of the list. This makes the next step easier.)

2) Select all title slides and apply the _TitleMaster background to these slides. Select all non-Title slides and apply the _Slide Master background.

3) Delete all library backgrounds other than _TitleMaster and _Slide Master.

Create text caption placeholders and export the captions

1) Disable Autosize captions on the Project menu. (Otherwise the captions you create in the next steps will not retain the size you want.)

2) On the first title slide, create a placeholder caption with the word Title as its content. Duplicate the size, location, and format of the PPT title master's placeholder for the slide's title. Use the same approach to create a placeholder caption with the word Text as its content. This second placeholder is for the PPT slide's subtitle. (The text you type into the placeholders is important because in a later step the VBA macro will use it to identify where to update titles and body text. So type in "Title" or "Text" without the quotes.)

3) Copy the two placeholders and paste them on the second blank slide, the one with the _SlideMaster background. Position the placeholders to match the PPT slide masters placeholders for slide title and body text. Format text alignment but don't bother to format font bullets at this time. The Heading 1-9 styles in Captivate.dot take care of this.

4) Copy the first slide's Title and Text placeholders to each additional title slide, if any exist.

5) Copy the second slide's Title and Text placeholders to each body slide. (You can use multiselect for the destination slides to speed the processs.)

6) Delete the first two slides -- the blank title slide and the blank body slide -- or move them to the end of the slide show. You want the Captivate slides to match the sequence of the PPT slides in the outline and these slides are in the way.

7) Export the captions (File > Import/Export > Export project captions and closed captions). Answer Yes to view the Word document.

Update the captions and import them into Captivate

1) With the Captivate Captions document open, use Word's VBA Editor to create the macros shown below and save them in Normal.dot. (Search Word's Help for "create a macro" to learn how to open the VBA Editor and insert a module. Then paste the code into the module to create the macros. You need complete this step only once.)

2) Using Word, run the macro named: ImportTextFromPowerPoint and follow the steps. (Consider adding the macro to a toolbar or as a menu item, storing the changes in AdobeCaptivate.dot. if you'll be using it repeatedly.)

3) Using Captivate, import the captions (File > Import/Export > Import project captions and closed captions). Notice that the body text comes in as indented bullets but that the subbullets are the wrong shape. That's as good as it gets since Captivate has only one gun.

The code below is without any warranty and may very well convert your PC into a smoking heap of ruins. However, if you do use it and have suggestions or encounter errors, I'd be interesting in knowing. I've tested it with Captivate V2 and V3 and Word 2003.

docedoc

Known Participant

Hey, welcome to the forum.

Captivate 2 brings a PowerPoint slide in as a single image and assigns that image to the slide's background. So if the slide has text, buttons, or the like, you get a static picture of those items. Clicking an imported button on the static image is like kissing a previous girlfriend's photo. Nothing much happens. I don't use Captivate V3 so don't know whether its new ability to import PPT animations would change much. It would be handy if she kissed back, eh?

If you really want to have PPT text be Captivate V2 text, it can be done, though the method is a bit like making sausage and once you see it you'll swear off links for good.

1) Using PowerPoint (PPT) send the outline to Word (File > Send to > Microsoft Office Word > Outline only) and then add one blank title slide and one regular slide as the first two slides in the PPT file. Doing so will create slide and title master backgrounds in the next step and give you two slides in Captivate that you'll use to create more slides.

2) Switch to Captivate and import only the first two slides from PPT.

3) The library will contain two backgrounds. Rename the backgrounds Slide and Title to make them easy to recognize.

4) Disable Autosize captions on the Project menu. Otherwise the captions you create in the next steps will not retain the size you want.

5) Create a placeholder Text caption for the title slide with the text "Title" and place it in the appropriate location in the first title slide, sizing and formatting it to be about the same as the PPT title master's placeholder. If you need the subtitle text, use the same approach to create a Text caption with Subtitle as the text.

6) Create a placeholder Text caption for the body slide with the text "Bullets" and place it in the appropriate location, sizing it to be about the same as the PPT master's text placeholder, but don't worry about creating the bullet format. If you need the two columns of text, use the same approach to create a second Text caption containing the text "Bullets2". (Consider saving as a Captivate Template if you're going to do this for many slide shows with the same design. Then you'd be able to create a file from the template and start the import at the next step)

7) Duplicate the blank title and body slides to match the sequence of these slides in the PPT source file.

8) Export the captions (File > Import/Export > Export project captions and closed captions). Answer Yes to view the document.

At this point you will have a Captivate project that looks like a new PPT file with empty title and body slides and the slide design as the background. You'll also have two Word documents open: the PPT outline and the Captivate Captions. Good progress, but you've only started. Think of it as having ground up the pork. Now you gotta stuff bloody mess of text into the sausage.

9) Using Word, copy text from the PPT Outline to the Captivate Captions Updated Text Caption Data column, replacing the placeholders that read Title, Subtitle, Bullets or Bullets2 as appropriate. Save the Cultivate Captions.doc.

10) Using Captivate, import the captions (File > Import/Export > Import project captions and closed captions). Notice that the body text comes in as indented bullets but that the subbullets are the wrong shape. That's as good as it gets, in V2 at least.

11) Using Captivate and PPT copy and paste images.

12) Recreate any buttons, links, audio, animations, or the like.

This method discards the PPT slide notes and does not label each Captivate slide with it's PPt slide title.

If you need to keep notes and do want slides labeled it's a bit more tedious. Import all the PPT slides (rather than only the first two). Delete the blank slides and all backgrounds other than those from the blank slides. Copy the Text caption placeholders to each imported slide rather than simply duplicating the title and body slides as in step 7. Adds perhaps five minutes to the conversion for 20-30 slides.

I'm working on automating step 9 via VBA macro, since it's the time consuming part and prone to errors. Let me know if you'd like to test the automation.

Phil

PutteKakkonenAuthor

Participant

Thank You for answering. So it´s just as "easy" I thought. I think it´s much easier to find a new girlfriend than try to fix the old one ;) But anyhow, it would be nice to try Your VBA macro.

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