HELP! Series of SWFs Broken (110 of them!)

Feb 19, 2013

Brent Berheim
By Brent Berheim

I have been asked to try to fix a large Presenter piece that someone who is no longer with the company created.  For some reason, each slide is a SWF.  Also, now, for some reason, those SWFs do not appear to be working.  When I republish the piece, all the ArticulateFlashObjects - as they appear in the selection panel - don't seem to work.

Since I am coming in after the fact, I have no clue why it was created this way - and don't have the time to re-create in any other fashion.

Any thoughts on why this may be happening?  I do note that in the Properties window - there is a directory path to the original creators desktop for the swf file - could that be the problem? 

Thanks for any help  or suggestions - I hate to think I am going to have to go in and reattach videos for 110 slides worth...

Brent

1 Reply
Paul Kornman
11 years ago02/19/13 at 9:50 am (UTC)

Unfortunately, yes, that is the problem. Powerpoint is looking for the swf file in the location specified in the "Movie" property of the Flash Object.

Good news: it's fixable but a little tedious. (I had hoped there was a VBA solution, but I cannot find one that works for me).

I assume you have access to all the original SWFs.

1. Move them all to a location near the Powerpoint deck (e.g. in a sub-folder called "Flash").

2. Go to each SWF on each Slide (this is the tedious part), Right-click on the SWF, and look at the "Movie" property.

Let's say its something like "C:\Users\jthomas\project1\working\animation\intro.swf"

Since you've already moved "intro.swf" to the "Flash" directory (step 1), change the Movie property to be just

"Flash\intro.swf"

so now you have a relative pathname (instead of an absolute one) to the movie.

NOTE: You won't see any difference until you save Powerpoint and re-open it.

Your mileage may vary, so try it on one slide first. (Change Path, Save, Close, Re-open).

Separate Note: To avoid this exact problem, we do all our development work on external hard drives that each developer maps to the same drive letter, with the same directory structure.

Good luck,

Paul

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