Adobe in Powerpoint - Post 2020

[chanm19601791]

Hi Adobe Community,  I have a question regarding Flash. I use Flash regularly on Powerpoints for teaching purposes. May I still be able to do so after 2020? I believe Adobe will not be running Flash on Chrome end 2020 onwards. Please advise. Thanks

[Test Screen Name · Accepted solution]

No, Adobe say Flash Player will be gone, but 

Microsoft and all major browsers will block it first. Adobe’s advice since this was announced a few years ago has been to convert to alternative ways of presenting info and training. 

[Asher@]

I have the same question. What's the alternative for Flash Player if we want to add videos to PowerPoints?

[Test Screen Name]

Ask Microsoft. Adobe are not making an alternative for Powerpoint users, but Powerpoint has no need of Flash to show a normal video file. 

Be clear though that you if you have SWF files, you need to use different technology, quite possibly remake the entire project from scratch. There is no magic converter, that’s why there was 3 years warning of the shutdown. 

[pjgfi2]

Maybe Adobe could as well have spend those three years developing a "magic converter" for Animate that would convert SWFs into this so wonderful and so powerful HTML5 format...

[chanm19601791]

Agree. Adobe could have used this 3 years to think of how to circumvent this problem. Wouldn't that have solved the issue ?

[pjgfi2]

Same here. I have around 40 SWFs embedded in PPT files. These are scientific interactive animations (very simple, like flipping switches) so they can't be converted to movies.

Can we assume that the standalone Flash Player (exe) will continue to work?

Then maybe we could "launch" SWF from PPT as long we have associated SWF to the Flash Player?

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

It's time to remove Flash dependencies from your Office documents.  Also, I'm pretty sure you can embed videos without using Flash Player. 

Since you're at an inflection point anyway, I'd recommend taking a minute to think carefully about not just what distribution format is most convenient for you, but what's most useful for your audience and the variety of devices that they might want to consume your content from.  I'm skeptical about the optimality of embedding videos in other documents for most use-cases (although I totally get embedding a video in your slide deck in the context of a live lecture). 

Also, Flash Player has been blocked in current versions of Office for a long time.  I think you can jump through hoops to enable it, but I wouldn't expect that support to remain in future versions.  We don't interact with the Office team much, but I imagine that they piggyback on IE for access to the ActiveX player, and when broad support for Flash Player is removed from Windows 8 and higher later this year, it's reasonable to assume that the facilities available to Office for playback will also go away.

In terms of the Standalone player, it will work until a breaking change to the underlying Windows APIs renders the standalone player unusable.  That's a matter of when, not if.  Much of the work we do is the invisible work of keeping up with the latest operating system and browser changes.  That work is no longer happening, unless your organization wants to license a maintained copy of Flash Player through HARMAN.  In the context of a handful of lesson plans, it would be far more cost-effective to recreate them in modern technologies.

[pjgfi2]

The problem is those SWFs are not videos but interactive animations.

I can't think of another tool where I could recreate them and they heavily rely on Flash features (masking, loops...).

[chanm19601791]

Certain animations are still needed in the flash format especially for Science subjects. These are useful as it allows the user to interact with the software and learn at the same time. Flash has it's share of good points and this is one of them. I suggest maybe coming up with another software to help restore this issue. It will be a big waste to the teaching community, if all the hard work that went into creating flask animations in powerpoint ends up in the drain.