HELP!!!!

May 20, 2011

Joe Ingles
By Joe Ingles

Okay, so I made a huge mistake. I made an awesome presentation and converted to Presenter.

But I need to make revisions. The problem is, my computer crashed and I had the backup saved on the hard drive.

Now I don't have a copy of the original PowerPoints.

So, is there any way I can extract the PowerPoints from Articulate Presenter?

Is there another way around this problem?

Please help. The project is due in about three days and I don't wanna spend all weekend long recreating the PowerPoints.

3 Replies
David Anderson
almost 13 years ago05/20/11 at 4:55 am (UTC)

Hey Joe,

I'm sorry that happened.

There really isn't anyway to recreate the PowerPoint files from the Flash files. If you have a recent published version, you can view your Flash .swf files in your published folder:

Documents\My Articulate ProjectsPROJECT-NAME\data\swf

You can try Flash decompilers but they're unreliable for most files. Also, decompilers try to recreate Flash-created files, not PowerPoint-to-Flash based .swf files. I don't think that's going to be much of an option.

Now, one strategy you could use would be to move your published files out of your default publish directory. You don't want to overwrite them with subsequent publishing.

Assuming you have an earlier, published version, you could use a workaround that helped some users before:

  1. recreate the course menu in PowerPoint (Slide titles, number of slides using blank slides, slide masters, and so on)
  2. Publish that new course skeleton
  3. copy over your slides from your earlier published course. You can replace the new, blank slides with your earlier published slides in the data\swf folder.
  4. Build new slides that you haven't already built or that require additional editing.
  5. Then go back and continue rebuilding the other files you copied over.

Yeah, this is not ideal but it can leverage your already completed, published swf files. Of course if you submit your course and your client requests any type of change on one of those files, you're going to have to rebuild it.

I'm sorry there isn't better news. We have a lot of consultants in the forums.... Maybe bringing on some weekend help would be an option?

Joe Ingles
almost 13 years ago05/20/11 at 5:13 am (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt reply. The good news is that, after my wife suggested it, I found the version created just before this on my laptop in the recycle bin. I will only have to do a minimal amount of work.

Thanks so much for your reply. I will keep in mind the steps needed to fix this if ever the need arises. In addition, I now have 17 different backup copies...just in case!

David Anderson
almost 13 years ago05/20/11 at 5:11 pm (UTC)

Awesome news, Joe--thanks for circling back with the good news.

A lot of us here use DropBox for project files. Not only is it a great backup tool, it integrates seamlessly with your folders--there's no separate application required.

You can get around 2gb for free which should be enough for any single project.

Anyway, glad to hear the good news--that's how Friday afternoons should close out

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