Converting PowerPoint to Authorware

What the Converter Can and Can’t Do For You

PowerPoint and Authorware are two very different products with different aims. It should come as no surprise that PowerPoint files sometimes cannot convert completely without losing something in the conversion, much like translating Chinese to English will result in a loss of nuance and words that don’t quite match perfectly between the languages.

For example, PowerPoint contains a set of transitions you can apply to objects and slides just as Authorware does. However, most of the transitions in PowerPoint don’t match those that Authorware offers. In this case, you can guide the converter in how to map transitions to your liking. Other features in PowerPoint may not have a direct equivalent in Authorware so may not come across as expected.

If you take any PowerPoint file and convert it to Authorware, you can expect that about seventy to eighty percent of the features will come through. Not good enough? Consider this: if eighty percent of a PowerPoint file converts correctly, you’ve just cut five days of work down to one!

Once you come to understand which features convert directly from PowerPoint, you can create templates in PowerPoint that avoid unsupported features, making converting PowerPoint files into Authorware an easy exercise. This article should help.

What’s Going to Happen?

This section is for the curious among you. You don’t have to be too concerned with the details of the conversion but it’s sometimes nice to know what’s happening behind the scenes.

Converting a PowerPoint file to Authorware is a two-step process, though there is an option to combine these two steps into one.

Step one creates a folder in a location you choose and will name it the same as your PowerPoint file followed by “(Internal Media),” such as:

Ganci - Developing Great e-Learning (Internal Media)

The folder will then contain a series of folders, one for each PowerPoint slide. Authorware names the folders slide followed by the slide number:

slide0
slide1
slide2
slide3

Each of the above folders contains the images and text from the respectively numbered PowerPoint slide. Note that the first folder is numbered zero, which contains the text and images from your PowerPoint file’s master slide.

In addition to the folder, the converter creates an XML file with the same name as your PowerPoint file. This XML file contains all of the information needed to reconstruct the slides in Authorware.

Step two imports the XML file and all of the image and text files from these folders and creates an Authorware file containing a Framework icon and a Framework page for each PowerPoint slide converted. Voilà! The conversion is complete.

Page 2 of 6

Previous Page

Next Page