Importing Powerpoint 2016 with audio into Captivate 2017

[tranzhuman]

Hi everyone,

I'm having trouble getting slide narration/audio from Powerpoint 2016 to import into Captivate 2017. I've done some reading in the forums and the consensus seems to be to import audio separately into a Captivate presentation, but I'm posting just as a re-check for a couple reasons.

Adobe's documentation states that Captivate should import slide narration from Powerpoint: Import and edit PowerPoint presentations in Captivate

Here's the paragraph in particular:

Narration in a PowerPoint presentation slide is imported as a sound object and appears as a separate object on the Timeline. Even in the linked mode, changes made to the audio file in Adobe Captivate after import are not reflected in the respective Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Similarly, changes made to the audio file in Microsoft PowerPoint are not reflected in the Adobe Captivate project. Object sounds are retained in the SWF file that is created from slides containing such objects.

My experience however is that this is not working in either Windows or OSX with Powerpoint 2016 and Captivate 2017. I also did a brief test with Captivate 9 on Windows. No audio is imported or available in the Captivate project from the Powerpoint file. Why don't I just move on and import the audio separately? I work with a lot of instructors who have already recorded their audio into Powerpoint. If Captivate was working as documented it would be a lot easier. Teaching an instructor how to extract the audio from their Powerpoint to then re-import it to Captivate may be a bridge too far for them.

I'm hoping I'm just missing something simple that is causing my audio to not import. Any tips or hints are appreciated. Thanks!

[Lilybiri]

I would never import audio that way. Please, import the audio clips directly in the Captivate Library and drag them from that Library to each slide.

[charbozzi]

I'm having this same problem with a PPTX file. However, I have an older PPT file that works just fine. I noticed that when you try to export the audio from a slide from the newer PPTX file, it exports as a .m4a media file, but the audio from the older file exports as a .wav file. I'm wondering if Captivate 2017 does not support .m4a and that is what's causing the issue. Any suggestions?

[Lilybiri]

No, Captivate does support wav and mp3 where wav is to be preferred because on publishing it will be compressed to mp3 by Captivate. As you did perhaps read, I never advice to import a ppt with audio at all. Please, import the audio clips separately in the Captivate library and add them in Captivate.

[charbozzi]

Thank you, but our audio is already recorded in PPT and I'm not sure how to easily record it without special software/tools. According to the Adobe documentation, it should be possible to import the audio easily, but it doesn't work. I'm happy to save each audio clip from PPT externally and then import it into Captivate, but when you save the audio file from PPT, the only save option is .m4a. I don't see a way to save the file as an mp3 or wav file. Any additional suggestions? Thank you.

[Lilybiri]

Adobe Media Encoder is shipped with Captivate, can you try to convert the audio clips to wav?

[tranzhuman]

Hi Charbozzi -

A summary of my understanding of the situation at this point: Adobe's documentation specifically states that importing a Powerpoint with audio is supposed to work with Captivate. Most instructors start by recording audio on their slides and have many lectures in this format so I was hoping I was missing something. Lilybiri's response is to import audio directly into Captivate.

This makes Captivate a less attractive tool for a lot of instructors I work with because I'm in your situation: A lot of instructors have courses worth of lectures with audio in Powerpoint. I understand that if I can get them to use Captivate from the start that's ideal but that's just not the reality. If that feature doesn't work as advertised Adobe should remove the feature and documentation stating that it works. Alternately state that it only works with PPTX files created with older versions of Powerpoint. I haven't tested to figure out which versions it works with exactly.

So we're left with extracting audio from Powerpoint to get it into Captivate. One method to extract the audio already recorded in a PPTX file rename the file to a .ZIP file. Extract the .ZIP file. Open the extracted .zip folder and look in the ppt/media folder for the audio files. You're right - more recently recorded audio will be in .m4a format. You'd have to then convert these to .wav to import into Captivate. In fact I'm guessing this is the issue with more recent PPTX files not importing with the audio to Captivate.

[Lilybiri]

Sorry, I didn't say that it doesn't work, but I have seen so many complaints that I proposed to import the audio files separately. That means that they'll show up in the Library, are much easier to manage, to synchronize and to edit.  I wrot already a lot of times that Captivate is not a PPT converter at all, but a full-blown authoring tool. If you only want to convert a ppt, you better use a plugin for PPT. That is my personal opinion, use the best tool for each purpose. I never use PPT for eLearning, don't even use it for presentations because I estimate that Captivate offers me more functionality. That doesn't mean at all that PPT is not a good presentation tool, but it is not an eLearning authoring tool.

[tranzhuman]

My apologies Lilybiri - I realized my error quickly and edited my response to reflect that you didn't state that it didn't work but rather recommended importing audio separately.

My frustration (with Adobe) is that Captivate does have an "Import Powerpoint" function that just doesn't work as advertised in their own support documentation. My guess is that at some point Powerpoint started saving recorded audio as .M4A rather than .WAV which broke Captivate's "Project from MS Powerpoint" workflow.

Thank you Lilybiri for your suggestions! Your points are well taken. I'm working on an "online lecture" tool questionnaire / matrix at the moment to try and help guide instructors to the right tool for their use case. I'm trying to balance instructor need, workflow, current licensing situation, documentation, and support of those instructors for a large campus. I don't know if Adobe reads any of these forum posts, but I'd like to request that Adobe consider adding support for importing the .m4a audio from PPTX files to Captivate's feature set.

[PennyParker]

Thank you to everyone involved in this discussion - I could not have done my work without your suggestions. I have exactly the same questions and problem and "solved" it by the zip suggestions, media encoder to mp3 and then importing each audio separately.

[ChidsPujar]

Just a question, why do you need to import the audio directly in Captivate instead of keeping it in PowerPoint?

Do you have any animations in the PPT file? will they not lose the synching if the audio is removed from PPT ?

I added the MP3 file in the PPT & then imported it into Captivate...that way the synching etc stayed ...

[Tammy_Moore]

I know this thread is coming up on being a year old, but I had the same question. However, for me, the oft recommended solution to rename the file to a zip instead of pptx wouldn't give me a successful upacking of the Powerpoint file so that I could get to any audio files. I really needed to get to those if I was going to tackle my current task. A little more research and I stumbled on this little app for Mac - File Juicer - Extract images from PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel and other Files on Mac OS X

It worked great. It unpacked the file and gave me folders organized by resource type. Interestingly, I was able to get the audio in the original wav file  format I imported into the pptx (it was a test case, so I might get a surprise if audio is recorded inside Powerpoint instead of being imported in).

I hope this will help others who are on a Mac and the only resource they have is a pptx file.

[aidanw50837144]

I have the same problem It would be nice if the feature worked as documented - it's my job to collate material from many sources, they have powerpoint and not capivate so it's easiest for them to record directly in PowerPoint. Now I have to find a workaround to strip the audio out of thousands of slides and resort them by hand in Captivate?

Can somebody tell me how to get the import pptx (2016) working correctly with audio in captivate 2017? Or delete the claim to this functionality from the documentation and spare me the frustration.

[ChidsPujar]

I am currently facing the same issue. The funny fact is, for the first PPT that i imported into Captivate 9, the audio came in with the import, but now with the second PPT, the audio is missing in the captivate file. Now, i am worried that if i do a manual import of the audio in the Captivate file, all my Synching animation would be lost...Does Adobe any solutions? I am surprised that there has been no updates inputs in this thread from Adobe.

[Lilybiri]

This is NOT  Adobe support, this is a user forum. A couple of people try to answer most questions, but me at least never use PPT import at all. Reason why I cannot help you, my bad.

[ChidsPujar]

Thanks Lilybiri, i understand this is a forum, but i am sure people have raised this issue to Adobe directly as well..but never have we heard about a resolution...I presume this is a correct forum to voice the issues that we face too...Just in hope that others have a solution 🙂

[Lilybiri]

If you want to reach Adobe, log a bug report. Here is a direct link:

Adobe Captivate

Hope for you someone can help, but I only did see the recommenfation never to import audio with slides from PPT.

[ChidsPujar]

Thanks for the link, i have reported the issue to Adobe.
So i went ahead and was experimenting...and the answer is:
If your PPT slide has MP3 audio, the audio comes in with the import...if there are wav files, Captivate does not support them (it seems). So if you have .wav files, convert them & they will then get imported safely into captivate.

I understand that many users do not prefer using the PPT import option, but this is a great tool if you have already recorded slides in the PPT... All the best people 🙂

[Lilybiri]

Captivate works with wav files when you import audio into Captivate. But those movie slides created from PPT, which you cannot control anymore? Probably ppt converts in another way from wav to mp3 which is incompatible with CP?

[ChidsPujar]

Not sure about how PPT to Captivate handles the Audio part...anyways, at least if anyone is facing this issue now can use this technique.

Any idea if Video in PPT can be imported to Captivate? any specific formats supported?