PPT import into FM

[Pinkham, Jim]

Hi, Corinne,
 
I thought I'd take a moment to revisit my quick post from Friday to your
question. Others have offered some good advice; what I'm about to add
just provides some additional resources for what I described:
 
1. Confirm that the original content doesn't exist anywhere else
first.If PowerPoint was a destination and not an origin, you might well
be in a better starting position to begin with the original document(s).

2. If PowerPoint is the only source material, my preferred approach
would be to deal with the graphics and text separately.
 A. For the text, (I'm using PowerPoint 2003), choose Send to --
Microsoft Office Word. On the next menu, choose Outline Only
 
    See http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=525941
<http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=525941>  and
http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=525942
<http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=525942> . I think this might be
a little more simple and direct than saving as RTF.

  1. If you have a very clean Word template that contains only your FM
styles, you might be able to copy and paste the text (non-formatted)
from the step above into your Word-to-FM template, apply the styles in
Word, and then bring the text into FM.
 
    The process of doing a good Word-to-FM conversion is described in
"Converting Between Word and Frame" at
http://www.techknowledgecorp.com/public/word2frame.pdf.

  2. Otherwise, I'd select all the text in your new Word doc (after
cleaning up extra spaces, paying heed to special characters, etc.) and
copy and paste your new Word doc content as plain text into, say, a
Notepad file and save that file as plain text, and then import the plain
text into a clean document created from your FM template.

  3. Once the text is in FM, begin applying (or correcting, as
necessary) styles and formatting to conform to your template.

 B. For the graphics:
  1. If not embedded, set up anchored frames in FM and begin importing
the images by reference from their locations on your computer or
network.
  2. If embedded, there is a PPT macro out there that will extract
images from a presentation. Save the images that result onto your hard
drive or whatever and then refer to Step 1 above. I can't post an
attachment to the list and you might find the macro online over the
weekend. The one in my My Documents folder is titled,
"ContainsPictureExtractMacro.ppt". If you get stuck and need it, contact
me off-list, and I'll try to help you next week.
 
    The PowerPoint with the picture-extraction macro is at
http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=525943. I did not write the
macro, I cannot remember where I found it, and I take no responsibility
for its use. Use at your own risk. One quick way to use it is to open
ContainsPictureExtractMacro.ppt, import your presentation with the
pictures into this document, go to Tools and run the macro. Then close
the file without saving so that you can easily repeat this process at
some future date. I just did this again to test how it worked, and it
dumped all the images in my test presentation as sequentially numbered
.JPG files to my desktop. Alternatively, you've read others' posts that
describe the HTML approach. Perhaps there are also newer, better tools
among the results of this search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mo
zilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=9n6&q=picture+extract+from+PowerPoint&aq=f&o
q=&aqi=. Glancing through, I saw a couple that looked interested and
appeared, at first blush at least, to be free.

Otherwise, others may be able to propose a better approach -- or perhaps
something similar to "Extracting Images Embedded in Word Documents," an
online resource by Lyn Eggleston that Google should turn up for you.
 
    Lyn's excellent resource remains at:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/aboutgraphics/ss/extractword.htm

OPTION B
If you don't need to change the content or formatting from how it is
today in the PowerPoint in the foreseeable future, convert the whole
presentation into a PDF and bring it into Frame a page at a time. There
are also batch tools out there to bring in the PDF en masse, I believe.
Also, if you search the archives, others have described here how to
bring in PDFs, page by page, and they maintain that with keyboard
shortcuts, patience, and persistance, it can be done without losing your
sanity.
 
    You've received some excellent replies on taking this tack, and the
one Yves described seems particularly elegant if it will work for your
situation.
 
Hope this helps,
Jim