5 Practical suggestions on how to choose a PowerPoint to Flash converter

I have come across many people who wonder why they they ever need to convert a powerpoint presentation into a flash file. At the oustart let me point out that this article does not focus on explaining why one should convert to Flash their powerpoint presentations. For an idea of the benefits you could visit MasternewMedia a blog focussed on flash conversions which gives 12 main advantages of PowerPoint converted to Flash format. On the blog you can find reviews; you can find some opinions on ppt 2 flash software: their features, functionality and quality.

A featured article on iSpring highlights 5 Practical suggestions on how to choose a PowerPoint to Flash converter tool:

Suggestion 1 : Quality of generated Flash content

As a first, and probably the main, key point we take Conversion Quality. Why? What is exactly involved into "Quality"?

We should say that PowerPoint to Flash conversion is complicated process. Converter should carefully transfer slide layouts, styles and all shapes to Flash movie keeping following parameters:

• Shapes geometry
• Positioning
• Autoshapes
• Text quality
• Text formatting
• Lists & bullets

Let’s to describe in brief how to examine key quality parameters when you are evaluating a powerpoint converter.

Shapes geometry and positioning. All shapes of your presentation should look the same in Flash movie and keep their positional relationship in every slide. The main trouble issue for this parameter is a distorted position of shapes at a converted Flash movie. If you, for example, have an array pointing to a triangle center, then at converted Flash presentation the array must point to the same place.

Text quality and formatting. All texts and their formatting are set in PowerPoint and Flash presentation should also have the same fonts, height and other formatting. The main point to pay attention to is if converter embeds all the fonts into the converted Flash presentation. If not, it will cause an incorrect displaying of all your texts.

Lists and bullets appearance. When you create a PowerPoint presentation you can use picture-style bullets, and this is a very specific only for powerpoint. A converter should carefully retain the original data structure, otherwise your Flash presentation will sprawl and presentation will become distorted and its quality will decrease greatly.

Slide transitions and animations effects. All PowerPoint animation features give a significant impact to your presentation. You can keep your viewers’ visual focus on important points of your presentation while describing it orally. A PowerPoint to Flash converter must keep all slide transitions and animation effects in the same way as you see them in PowerPoint. And remember, if a converter tries to emulate effect or to replace one animation effect with another, then this is an alarm for you, telling that this converter is not as good as supposed to be.

Often, problems with quality of generated flash content are connected with how deep and thorough a converter parses PowerPoint presentation.

Many tools make conversion process very simple: save every shape or even a whole slide as a raster image. Besides a quality loss, such an approach doesn't give any possibilities of using all advantages of Flash format.

What's the big deal about vector and raster graphics?

Raster graphics cannot be scaled to a higher resolution without loss of apparent quality. This is in contrast to vector graphics, which easily scale to the quality of the device on which they are rendered. What does it mean for you? The only and the main meaning is that your PowerPoint presentation should be converted to Flash with a really high quality.

So, it's up to you to decide whether you want your Presentation to be converted to be exactly the same as your PowerPoint presentation.

If PowerPoint to Flash converter is of high quality, then all flash technology advantages are highly involved. Alongside with Quality, converters should also generate compact flash files.

Suggestion 2 : Speed & Output file size

The second key point is Speed & Output file size. A sample presentation was converted for 60 seconds with usual Flash Converter. The fastest tool did it for 15 seconds, feel the difference? When you work with PowerPoint presentations every day, you will clearly understand that speed can be of great importance.

Output file size from the sample presentation is 600 Kb in average. Record-holder made it 292 Kb. Together with speed, file size can show you the difference.

Conversion speed is an implicit quality indicator. If all other parameters are at a high level, then most probably you have an excellent PowerPoint to Flash converter at your disposal.

Suggestion 3 : Support of animations and effects

What about PowerPoint Animations support? We think you won't be glad if you lose them after conversion. To have a perfectly converted Flash presentation, you need to have software with a total support for all PPT animations. Many PPT 2 Flash converters announce Animations support, and it's true sometimes.

What you should keep an eye on is to what extent implementation of Animation effect in Flash looks the same as in PowerPoint presentation.

All PowerPoint animation effects are unique, and this is a strange case: converter states 170+ effects, but in fact it's about 35, all the other animations are emulated by some other effect from those 35. Is it what you're looking for?

Let's say you want to use rather unique Animation effect "Comb", in fact a flash converter can leave it still, or without any comb-like movement.

Also, we highly recommend you to pay attention to Transition effects. The situation can be the same as with Animation effect, though Transition effect can be much more important than Animation effects. Your PowerPoint to Flash converter should work with all effects precisely and with high efficiency.

Suggestion 4 : File size and structure of output (solid file or a set of files)

What people don't notice sometimes is what you have as a conversion result. We're talking now about Solid flash & set of flash file. What's the reason in making it separately? When you convert a single PowerPoint Presentation, you can expect a Flash file to be also single. What a surprise it'll be when you find .html, images and flash files in an output folder.

It's just great when a solid flash file embeds all external resources (audio/video/images) used for your presentation. We know that iSpring Pro embeds even a player into Flash presentation.

When you want to get a set of separate flash files, then this is also should be correctly realized by ppt 2 flash tool - every single slide should correspond to a single separate flash file.

Suggestion 5: Price

The last, but not the least comparison point is the Price. The average price range for PPT to SWF converter is from $59 to $800. This is not cheap, but actually not so expensive in comparison with expenses for flash development. Actually all the effective and high quality software starts from $200, this is the price we recommend you to start from when looking for a PowerPoint to Flash converting tool.

All the above mentioned comparison point can be general decisive moments when you're looking for a PPT to SWF converters.

Which tools do you use to convert ppt to flash. Share your experience ? Are there any practical suggestions that you would like to add to this list ?