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How does PPT2HTML handle links and other PowerPoint features?
PPT2HTML converts most of PowerPoint's Action Settings and Links automatically.
PPT2HTML creates HTML links to the appropriate HTML file for the following Action Settings:
- Next Slide
- Previous Slide
- First Slide
- Last Slide
- Previously Viewed Slide (becomes Javascript that activates the browser's Back button)
- URL links
- End Show
- Run Program links
- Play Sound actions
- Play AVI actions are converted into links to the AVI file
- Hyperlinks within text
Run Program Links
PPT2HTML can convert PowerPoint's Run Program action settings, but getting them to work correctly from within a browser when someone visits your site can be tricky and depends on:
- What programs are on the visitor's computer Links to files like PDFs or Word DOC file will only work if the user has software to open these files installed on their computer.
- Browser security settings The user's security settings may prevent links to some files from running. Unless you control the security policies on the user's computer, there's nothing you or we can do about this.
- Linked files must be uploaded If you use Run Program links, test them after you've converted your presentation to HTML and uploaded the results AND the linked files to your site. Testing the HTML on your local drive isn't really testing at all. Unless the linked files are where they're supposed to be on your site, the links won't work.
Because of the number of variables involved, we can't offer technical support for Run Program action settings. We can help you verify that PPT2HTML has created the link properly. We can't guarantee that the link will work on all systems.
Links to Sounds
PPT2HTML converts links to sound files in your PPT to javascript actions that play the sound when the user clicks the link in the browser. When it encounters sound links during conversion to HTML, PPT2HTML attempts to copy linked sounds or export embedded sounds to the output folder along with the other HTML files. This way, all you need to do is upload the entire folder to your web server and everything will work properly.
Links to Movies
PPT2HTML converts links to movie files in your PPT to HTML links to the movie file. PPT2HTML attempts to copy linked movies to the output folder along with the other HTML files. This way, all you need to do is upload the entire folder to your web server and everything will work properly. The links in your HTML files will be relative (just the file, no path) so it won't matter where you upload them, so long as they're in the same folder as the HTML files.
There are a few things you should understand:
- Sounds and movies won't play automatically; they'll be clickable links.
- There's no way to know exactly how links to sound and movie files will work when someone views your web pages. It depends on their browser, operating system, security settings and other factors. This isn't a limitation of PPT2HTML, it's a simple fact of web life. The same limitation applies no matter what program creates your web pages.
- Navigation actions take precedence over sounds. That is, if you have an action button in PowerPoint that advances to the next slide and plays a sound, PPT2HTML translates the Next action and ignores the sound, since links in HTML can't perform two actions.
- Sound files are big. If you use sounds, your presentations take longer to download and begin playing.
If you want to include narration in your HTML presentation, it's generally best to use only one sound per slide and make that the slide's Transition sound. See the section on slide transitions in PPT2HTML Placeholder Reference for more info and also check Javascript for slide transition sounds for a bit of Javascript code you can add to your templates to make these sounds play automatically when the HTML page loads.
You can also get one sound to play through the entire presentation if you like. It's a bit tricky and involves frames and a bit of manual HTML editing. See Play a sountrack across multiple slides (uses frames) to learn how.
What PPT2HTML won't convert
PPT2HTML doesn't convert several general classes of PPT features:
- Stuff that would require it to write huge amounts of browser-incompatible HTML.
- Animations
- Multiple Masters from PPT 2002 and onwards -- we're working on that one
- Stuff it's never occurred to us to convert because nobody's asked for it
That last item is a hint. We've added dozens of new features to PPT2HTML because one of our customers asked us to.
Just a few examples:
- The ability to convert PowerPoint's slide transitions into MSIE transitions; you simply have to add a line or two of HTML to your templates and PPT2HTML takes care of the rest. See the section on Slide Transitions in PPT2HTML Placeholder Reference to learn how.
- Extensive formatting control over the times and dates reported by the time and date placeholders.
- The ability to have PPT2HTML to create images only, no HTML files at all
- The ability to make external http: links open in the current window, in a single additional window, or in a new window for each link, your choice.
- The ability to map certain characters like ampersands to the equivalent html entity; the ability to create and use custom mapping tables so you can map characters any way you like, so you can create multilingual HTML from your PowerPoint files.
- Support for embedded Flash movies
- Dozens of other features, large and small
If you have a way of coding a feature into your templates and need to use specific info from your presentation to do it, talk to us. Make a reasonable case for a new placeholder, show us an example template that illustrates what you have in mind and we'll make every effort to accommodate you.
Basically, if PowerPoint will tell us what your template needs to know, we'll help you work out a way of getting the info.
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