Using Director > Using Interactive Media Types > Using PowerPoint presentations |  |

Using PowerPoint presentations

You can import Microsoft PowerPoint 4 presentations into Director and then play your presentations as they are, or you can use them as a starting point for creating rich multimedia projects in Director. You can save your Director project as a stand-alone projector or as a movie for the Web. For example, you can animate your presentation by adding bars or lines one at a time, or you can synchronize music, sounds, or video to action in your movie—such as a self-running presentation with voice-over narration—or advance a presentation to the next slide after the narration on the current slide finishes.

Importing your PowerPoint presentations into Director imports the artwork, text, and transitions as individual cast members into your Director cast, converts each PowerPoint slide into a Score section, and assembles the Score for you—complete with build effects and tempo settings that pause the action when necessary. You can use Director to add sophisticated interactivity, sounds, and animations.

Lingo can add more interactivity, such as letting users decide the order in which to view slides in a kiosk, track the slides visited, and list the slides still to be viewed.

Importing a presentation into Director creates a copy of the presentation file. Because the presentation you play in Director is a copy, not the original PowerPoint file, you can enhance your presentation in Director without affecting the PowerPoint original. In most cases, the Director movie will look and act almost exactly like the PowerPoint presentation. For a list of differences, see Comparison of PowerPoint and Director features.