powerpoint to flare, howto ?

[kevinmcl]

Windows 7, Office 2007, Flare 8.

I need the content of a 100-slide PowerPoint presentation in my current Flare project. What's the most straightforward way to get it there? I need the text and diagrams intact. I need the text to be editable, like any Flare Help topic. It's a very plain .pptx, with no audio, no animations.

PowerPoint exports in a few formats, but none that I find useful. Word won't open a pptx file (that I can see). LibreOffice (my usual go-to) also seems to preserve a hard line between presentations and documents, with no obvious bridge.

Saving as .html just gives me a bogus windows not-quite-file plus a same-name directory full of bits and pieces, none of which are much use.

Flare doesn't overtly know what to do with MimeHTML (.mhtml), so that export option doesn't appear to be worth pursuing.

My archive search revealed several people wanting to achieve PowerPoint-like effects in Flare (some via Mimic), but that's nothing like what I want. I just want to bring the presentation into my Flare project as text topics and text-topics with diagrams... without opening the presentation in PowerPoint and spending the day cutting and pasting individual paragraphs/bullets, and individual diagrams. I fully expect to do all the formatting with styles in Flare.

Am I missing the obvious - a one-click solution that's right there in the menu...?
Or am I missing the obvious - it can't be done... ?

- kevin

[RamonS]

Did you try the low tech approach of copy and paste?

I think the biggest obstacle is the requirement to have the text editable. You may need to 'disable' the text and add that back in within Flare while importing the rest as graphic file.

[kevinmcl]

Did you try the low tech approach of copy and paste?

I think the biggest obstacle is the requirement to have the text editable. You may need to 'disable' the text and add that back in within Flare while importing the rest as graphic file.

Um............. " I just want to bring the presentation into my Flare project as text topics and text-topics with diagrams... without opening the presentation in PowerPoint and spending the day cutting and pasting individual paragraphs/bullets, and individual diagrams. "

If nobody chimes in with yet-another head-slapping moment (for me) then I'll have to do just that, except that I'll copy and paste the texty bits, and I'll use a screen-cap utility to grab the diagrams and save 'em into my Content\Resources\Images folder.

[LTinker68]

I wonder if you can save as an XML document or an XPS document and try importing it? I think you can output to XPS in Flare so maybe you can import it, too. I've never tried, but you could try it with a single page of the presentation to see if it works. Something with text and an image.

[wbrisett]

So, I cheated a bit, but was able to do this. However, there is still a lot of cleanup. First, save the PowerPoint as a PDF. Then using Acrobat, save it as a Word document. Then import the Word document. It's not the perfect solution, but it does work.

Wayne

[wclass]

I don't think there is a straight forward way, but here are some ideas to get text, notes, and images from PowerPoint:

• From PPT, Save As RTF - this can be opened in Word and the text/bullets/lists are quite clean, but does not include the images.
• From PPT, Save and Send then Create Handouts - creates a Word document with all the text you have in the Notes section, but the main slides are converted to images.
• As mentioned in a previous post, via PDF then to Word - then I'd save as HTML to extract all the images.

[Johanna]

In case someone still reads this topic:
to get the images rename the pptx to .zip. Unpack it e.g. with 7zip and there you will have all the images in the media folder.