Adobe Flash is a program that creates animation (among other things). The animation is published to an SWF file. If you have created a Flash animation or just have access to one, you can insert it into PowerPoint. Unfortunately, the results are often problematic and depend on your version of Flash, PowerPoint, your operating system, and a feature called ActiveX. The plus side is that Flash can create awesome animation; it has many more advanced animation features than PowerPoint.
Display the Developer tab
To access the tools for inserting the SWF file, you need to display the Developer tab. It isn’t displayed by default. Choose File (or the Office button)> (PowerPoint) Options. In PowerPoint 2007, in the Popular category, check the Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon check box. In PowerPoint 2010 and 2013, go instead to the Customize Ribbon category. On the right side of the dialog box, check the Developer check box and click OK.
Insert and configure the SWF file
Follow these steps to put a Flash movie in your PowerPoint presentation:
- Write down the location of the SWF file you want to use.
- Go to Developer tab, Controls group, More Controls.
- Choose Shockwave Flash Object from the list and click OK.
- Drag a box across the screen to get the desired size and location.
- Right click the box and choose Property Sheet. A window with a table of pr9operties opens.
- In the Properties window, click the Movie item. Type the full URL of the SWF file.
- Set the other parameters, if you wish, for example, Embed Movie: True; Loop: False.
- Close the Properties window using its Close box.
- Go into Slide Show view to see the movie. If your movie didn’t appear in Normal view, it will appear when you return to Normal view after running the slide show.
Tips for best results
Here are a few tips and gottchas:
- Match the movie background to the background of your PowerPoint template/presentation — or vice versa.
- If the Flash movie doesn’t play, open the Properties window again and look at the Playing property. If it says False, click Playing, then the down arrow and change the Playing property to True. Read more about this below.
- Files placed on master will play continuously from slide to slide to create an animated background (but that can get distracting).
- PowerPoint can’t recognize any mouse clicks on top of a Flash object, so don’t make the Flash object the full size of the slide; you need to have some area to click to the next slide.
- If the SWF animation starts to play but stalls, right-click it and choose Play.
The bug
There is a well-known bug that you may run into; it automatically changes the Playing property to False if the Flash movie is not set to loop. To test your situation, run through the presentation, close it, open it again and run through it again. Does the SWF animation play? Here are some solutions to this problem:
Use the right-click menu
In Slide Show view, right-click the SWF file and choose Play.
Save the presentation as a PowerPoint Show
Follow these steps:
- Reset the Playing property of the SWF file(s) to True. To do this, select the Shockwave Flash object, right click it and choose Property Sheet. On the Playing row, click so you see a drop-down arrow, then click the arrow and choose True.
- Save the presentation as a Show. First save your presentation, then choose File > Save As. From the Save as Type drop-down list, choose PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx). Keep the same file name and click Save.
From now on you can play the presentation by opening the .ppsx file and the Flash movie will always play. However, it may not play if you display the slide with the SWF file a second time while the file is open.
Create some Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code to control the Playing property
This method is more complex but lets you present from the original presentation file. Use this method if others will modify the PowerPoint presentation.
Follow the same steps to insert the Flash movie. In step 7, change the Loop seetting to False. Now follow these steps to create the VBA code:
- On the Developer tab, click the View Code button. The Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window opens.
- Choose Insert > Module.
- In the main window, enter the following code, where the number in the 3rd line after the word “Slides” is the number of the slide containing the Flash movie.
- That’s it! Return to your presentation and play it through in slide show view to test it.
Sub OnSlideShowPageChange()
Dim obj As ShockwaveFlash
Set obj = _ ActivePresentation.Slides(2).Shapes(“ShockwaveFlash1”).OLEFormat.Object
obj.Playing = True
obj.Rewind
obj.Play
End Sub
As you can see, the code simply sets the Playing property to true, rewinds the movie, and plays it.
Note: if you want more than one Flash movie in a presentation, you need to give additional movies unique shape names in the 4th line of the code. The 2nd one could be “ShockwaveFlash2” for example. Then, in the Properties window, give the object the same name in the Name row.
Next, go to the slide containing the Flash movie. From the Drawing toolbar, insert a blank Action Button. In the Action Settings dialog box that opens, choose the Run Macro option, choose the macro from the drop-down list (“OnSlideShowPageChange” in the previous example), and click OK. With the action button still selected, type some text on the button, such as “Play Movie” to label the button. Now, whenever you need to play the movie in slide show view, you can simply click the button.
You can also use the button to replay the animation if your audience wants to see it a second time.
Your macro security settings may stop the VBA code from running. Make sure it isn’t set to high. Go to File/Office buttons > (PowerPoint) Options > Trust Center> Trust Center Settings> Macro Security and choose a different setting. If you choose the setting to enable all macros, I recomment that you change the seting back to its original value when you’re done presenting. In addition, coding in the Flash file itself may stop the movie from playing.
When you save the file, you’ll be prompted to save it as a macro-enabled presentation, which is a PPTM file.
My thanks to the following people for the information about creating non-looping Flash movies: Jane Horb, who researched and spent a lot of time going over this issue with me; Paul Hewitt, who came up with the technique of saving the presentation as a PowerPoint show (.pps file); Meg Wyrwas; and the following Support people at Microsoft: John Slack, Rich Porter, and Jeff Qiu.
Christopher Contois notes that you should be careful about the 4th line of code because it hard codes the slide number (2 in the example). Therefore, if you move that slide or add or delete slides before it, you need to remember to change the slide number.
The original instructions have been updated to apply to PowerPoint 2007, 2010, and 2013.
Learn easy principles and techniques that designers use. “Slide Design for Non-Designers” shows you, step-by-step, how to easily get the results you want. Plus bonus theme, template, sample slides, and 5 short video tutorials to make implementing the principles easy.Updated for PowerPoint 2016/365. Learn more at http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/pptblog/slide-design-for-non-designers/
Just an additional snippet for Powerpoint 2007 and 2010 you cannot embed the .swf Flash file inside Powerpoint as it was possible to do in 2003. You can embed a Flash file in 2007 & 2010 if in the shockwave flash properties you select embed as set its state to true and then save Powerpoint as a macro enabled…PPTM and not PPTX
i cannot find a way to put clips into powerpoint 2010 why can’t i? i mean i can do it in 2007 but not 2010!
The explatnation above helped me a lot, especially the VBA code.
Except the underscore, it gave an error, but after deleting the underscore, everything worked fine.
I only have one problem. I can not advance to the next slide with mouse click. Because we use remote controls during presentations, this is a problem. Can somebody help me with this?
Does the Flash animation cover the entire slide? If it does, there’s no place to click. I’m not sure how that would affect a remote, however. Thanks for the information about the underscore.
Any ideas what in the flash files could be stopping it to play?
Still no joy with the above! 🙁
Swf plays fine normally. also i’m running 2007
Any help would be great.
I suggest you try the PowerPoint Answers discussion group at http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/powerpoint?tab=all. Analyzing the problem involves dealing with your operating system, version of PowerPoint, version of the Flash Player, etc. A lot goes into making it work correctly. I think you’ll get a better answer there. Good luck!
ok thanks. will try that
hello Ellen,
thanks for your tips, can play the flash in powerpoint!
can I embed a flash player into powerpoint so that I can deliver the powerpoint to other?
thanks
Delong
Delong,
The recipient needs to have the Flash player. Most computers have it. But iPads and iPhones famously don’t play Flash animations.
When my swf-filled presentation ends (ppsx), I am ALWAYS prompted to save changes to the (PowerPoint 2010) file. Is this what is usual?
Hi,
I need your help. Suppose there are 3 slides and all threes have .swf files. Now in the slide show when i press back or previous slide, i want to play the video (.swf) from the beginning not the resuming one. How can i do it by macro please help me.
I just used this code for a technical animation related to automotive technology for one of the instructors in my school. It works pretty well. I needed to change the playing value to false in order the animation not to start by itself and I added a command button to make it play. I was searching for this solution for a month now. Thanks a lot for making the life much easier.
This was working… but Win 8.1 and IE11 computer stopped working. I’m using to embed Youtube in to PowerPoint but on showing, I only get a big white box where the video used to play.
Not sure if there has been an update to IE or Win that may have caused this. Wondering if anyone else has found similar… or a solution?
If you want Stop and Play Buttons to control Flash animations in PowerPoint 2010+ then here is the VB code to use, just attach the actions to any button using macros.
Sub SlideShowBegin()
Dim obj As ShockwaveFlash
Set obj = ActivePresentation.Slides(1).Shapes(“ShockwaveFlash1”).OLEFormat.Object
obj.Playing = False
obj.Rewind
obj.Stop
End Sub
Sub WindowSelectionChange()
Dim obj As ShockwaveFlash
Set obj = ActivePresentation.Slides(1).Shapes(“ShockwaveFlash1”).OLEFormat.Object
obj.Playing = True
obj.Rewind
obj.Play
End Sub
Sub WindowSelectionChange2()
Dim obj As ShockwaveFlash
Set obj = ActivePresentation.Slides(1).Shapes(“ShockwaveFlash1”).OLEFormat.Object
obj.Playing = False
obj.Stop
obj.Rewind
End Sub
Hi,
I’m using powerpoint vba to program a scoring system. I got a score (which is a variable) which require animation. May I know how do I pass this variable to flash to animate and pass back to powerpoint?
Thank you for any advices.
Does the animation need to be done in Flash? How about doing it in PowerPoint? You could probably do everything in Flash, but you’d need to know how to program Flash (it uses something called ActionScript, I think)
Hi Ellen,
Does the animation need to be done in Flash?
I’m not sure whether powerpoint can animate dynamic variable and I’m not sure whether there is other program that can work with flash.
How about doing it in PowerPoint?
Can I animate dynamic variable using powerpoint? Hope you can advise me.
Ok, I can do some research on ActionScript then.
Thank you,
Ben
Here’s some code that cycles through all the slides and resets the animation on each one. Useful for multiple embedded flash animations. Sub OnSlideShowOpen() ”Ignore Non-flash pages On Error Resume Next For x = 1 To ActivePresentation.Slides.Count Step 1 Dim obj As ShockwaveFlash Set obj = ActivePresentation.Slides(x).Shapes(“ShockwaveFlash1”).OLEFormat.Object obj.Playing = True obj.Rewind obj.Play Next x End Sub
Thanks for very useful advice, I managed to put flash animations in a powerpoint presentation. Unfortunately I ran into difficulties when I attempted to project the presentation. The animations all worked on the computer but when connected to a video projector they would not work. I was in the presenter mode where the following slide is displayed together with the projected slide. Do you have any ideas as to what was happening?
Thanks for your help
Michael Cook
I’ve seen this happen occasionally and not only with Flash animations. My colleague, Steve Rindsberg, has some suggestions at http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00467_Videos_play_correctly_on_computer_but_not_on_projector_-black_box-.htm. Did any of those help?
Yes its really works…..!!thanks alot..:)
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Hi,
I’ve been using a shockwave animation in a powerpoint for a while now but on opening the presentation today an error message of ‘PowerPoint found a problem’ appeared with the option to repair or cancel. Upon pressing repair a second message read ‘Some controls on this presentation cant be activated. They might not be registered on this computer’ followed by ‘Powerpoint couldn’t read some content and removed it’. The animation now doesn’t work. I have tried updating the Flash player and haven’t made any other alterations to the system or Powerpoint settings, could you help?
Thank you
This is a known issue and apparently from the side of Flash. There is a thread on Adobe’s forum at https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=4062206. There may be some solution there.
[…] Putting Flash animation in … – Adobe Flash is a program that creates animation (among other things). The animation is published to an SWF file. If you have created a Flash animation or … […]
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Hi Ellen, I have PowerPoint 2013. I’ve used Shockwave property sheet to add a youtube video to a powerpoint slide. I then did the following so the video will play automatically in slideshow mode: 1. in the Movie Line paste the URL for the youtube video 2. remove “watch?”; add a “/” after the “v”; and remove the “=” 3. at the end of the URL add “&start720&autoplay=1” 4. under the Playing line change it to True and close box My problem is that I have to convert the entire powerpoint file into a video (MP4)to place it in a… Read more »
Sherri, here are some ideas:
If you have access to the original video that was uploaded to YouTube, use that. Then just insert it as a video, without using the Shockwave technique. Most YouTube videos aren’t in .flv or other Flash format.
If you can download the YouTube video, use a video converter. There are many free ones, just search.
Use software to record the playing of the presentation, something like Camtasia or Camstudio.
Hope this helps!
Ellen
Thanks for the tips. It works!
How do I use the action button to play the movie. Do I have to save the pptm as a different version to play the movie using the button? If so, my animation covers the screen so I couldn’t see it anyway unless I move it off screen.
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How to insert video into PowerPoint from computer or Mac?
You can insert a video by choosing Insert tab, Video and choosing a location. I don’t have a Mac but I assume it’s pretty similar. You won’t have any trouble if it’s an MP4 file. For other formats, you may have to convert the file type. There are lots of free online services that do this.