Imported PowerPoint Slides appear to shrink!

[LadyGaladriel13]

In the past two weeks I've notice that when I import slides from any PowerPoint presentation, they appear to shrink in size in both edit and storyboard view. When I preview the slides, they look absolutely fine.

This is proving to be a nightmare when trying to add captions etc to each slide!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

See if the last item listed on the page linked below helps.

Click here to view

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcererStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[LadyGaladriel13]

Thanks Rick.

The link was useful but hasn't answered my question.

I was importing one or two slides into my captivate project and all was going as expected. I saved everything (in case of sudden, unexpected crashes) and then imported one more slide. The newly imported slide shrunk! I tried it again - same thing

The odd thing is that when I publish it or preview it, everything looks fine.

Cheers

LadyG

[Captiv8r]

Hi again

My thought here is that the imported slide is an animation. These kinds of slides are often imported from PowerPoint because of animated builds in PPT. So if you have upgraded your Flash Player, the animation exhibits the behavior I pointed you to.

Further, perhaps you had one Captivate project that was created from a PPT without animation. In that case you would have static slides that didn't exhibit the behavior. But when you imported a PPT imported slide containing an animation, BANG! Things appear to fall apart.

And if this is the case, your choices are:

• uninstall the newer version of the Flash Player/Plug In and install the recommended older version
• learn to live with the fact your animation will appear smaller during edit but will be presented just fine when you publish
  

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcererStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[LadyGaladriel13]

Hi Rick,

The slides I'm importing don't have any animations/transitions at all - just plain slides with text. It's strange how things were working well, and then suddenly they weren't.

Cheers

LadyG

[RDSTUDY]

Hi Rick and LadyG,

I am having the same issue.  Everything was working fine until I copied and pasted a background from powerpoint into the captivate presentation for slides that I made in captivate (to keep the look consistent).  The imported slides from powerpoint shrink on the canvas and are not readable.  The slides produced in captivate - question slides, which utilize the copied background remain full size and are not problematic.  The powerpoint slides contain transitions in them BUT up until I made this one background exchange did not encounter any problems, everything work flawlessly.  If I open a project that was completed prior to me copying this background to work on, the slides produced in powerpoint immediately shrink on the canvas.  Once again the captivate slides remain fine.  Once published everything works ok, but clearly this removes the functionality of being able to time the audio with the transitions. I tried to delete the copied file but the problem still ocurr's.

So to sum up :

     1. Everything functioned as designed (including transitions) up until a background was cut and pasted from powerpoint 2007 into a captivate 4.0 project.

     2. Now ALL projects both newly created and ones created prior to this action have the powerpoint slides shrunk on the Captivate canvas, while any slides created in captivate are not affected.

     3. Publishing the project does not reflect any problems.

     4. I am unable to time transitions due to this issue and thus renders Captivate useless to me.

Thanks for any help!

Rob

[Captiv8r]

Hi folks

Can one or both of you record the process and post the link here for us to view?

There are a couple of free tools you may use.

Screenr ( http://screenr.com )

Jing ( http://www.jingproject.com )

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcererStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[RDSTUDY]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the quick turnaround.  I actually uninstalled captivate, reinstalled then tried the

directions outlined in the above link that you posted a second time.  I had to download the flash uninstaller for the first set of instructions would

not allow me to install the older version.  I am not sure if the uninstall and reinstall of captivate was necessary, an old habit I guess.

At first the slides were only corrected in the work area in the captivate 4.0 authoring tool.  But if you clicked on the slides in edit mode, then clicked edit powerpoint, the filmstrip then took on the correct size immediately, and then the size in storyboard also corrected itself.

For me this solved the problem.  Once again thanks for your help and the quick response.

Rob

[wcrawford3]

Rob,

I am having an idential problem.

Thanks for summarizing.

[NeedsHelp_37]

Yes, this same issue of the small size imported PowerPoint slides is happening to me, as well. I read the "solution" was to downgrade the Flash player. Too bad that's the only solution right now.

[Captiv8r]

And the up side is that you have a means to change it if you wish to downgrade the player.

So at least there's a workaround! Yay!

While that may sound annoyingly optimistic I am sincere with it because with software you often see cases where no workaround really exists. You see cases where the only "workaround" is to hope and pray the dev team issues a service release soon to address it.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcererStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[LadyGaladriel13]

Well, after much tinkering around with Flash Player and Active X controls, I can report that the workaround does work

I have rolled back to an earlier version  of Flash - not and easy task when your computer group policy gets it the way!

I've tested out several different powerpoint slide imports and everything is back to normal again.

Thanks for all the advice and help.

LadyG

[KellyPhillipsNC]

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else, so forgive me if this is already common knowledge. Adobe has created a fix for this issue!  I've applied it

and it works. I did not have to uninstall Flash 10 first. I just applied it over the old version.  I'm running Flash 10 and Captivate 4.  It's an update to the link posted earlier, which is also in the frequently asked questions area of the forum.

Kelly