Talk:Import PowerPoint

The Lesson/Importppt.Php says //This is a very rough importer for powerpoint slides

   //Export a powerpoint presentation with powerpoint as html pages
   //Do it with office 2002 (I think?) and no special settings
   //Then zip the directory with all of the html pages 
   //and the zip file is what you want to upload
   // supports book and lesson

Note from chris: Moodle 1.6 from 6/7/06 onward has latest importppt.php. I am able to use this function when I created a new lesson. It works with most versions of MS PowerPoint. It has limitations in its current form but it will import a basic presentation. It is not designed to work on other programs like OO Impress (yet). --Chris collman 2 21:43, 8 June 2006 (WST)

I have played with a short Powerpoint presentation in 3 different formats, exporting each one to a webpage and zipping the folder's files. What ever PP you use, each page should have a simple format otherwise there will be inconsistant results. The higher priced program (PowerPoint) has sloppy code and is not tidy. You will never see them until you look at the web page files, but it keeps images of old deleted pages. The first time I tried to upload a PP2003 zip file, I got the same 5 character text string , in front of every line of text in every lesson page. This did not happen with an uploaded PP2000 zip that was created by opening the PP2003 presentation then saving as a PP2000 presentation and then saving as a Web Page. I opened up new presentation in PP2003 and immediately imported the pages from the PP2000 presentation. That got rid of the deleted pages and the resulting Lesson did not have the 5 character text string and it looked good. So it works and you mayhave to play. See Todd's comment below. Chris collman 2 20:14, 16 June 2006 (WST)

Todd Luger said this in ImportPPT in Lesson Forum on June 12, 2006. "This is very cool and it worked perfectly for me using Mac OS 10.4 and Powerpoint 2004. I imported a text only version of a ppt I had set up as a storyboard for a case based simulation game." Decided I (Chris) would summarize his storyboard experience as an example. --Chris collman 2 03:10, 14 June 2006 (WST)

I just tried doing the same with Openoffice impress >save as html >zip> import and it failed in 1.7dev 4June6 CVS. I understand market size but starting with products (OSS) that do more to help the institution of education over the institution of profit(M$) is more noble, IMHO. --Dennis Daniels 11:47, 8 June 2006 (WST)

Amen! I think importing OO Impress web based files might be easier, because they are simplier. Have you checked the file structure of the folder you zipped? Very different than the higher priced product. I don't think it creates seperate objects for each image on the page. Looks to me as if there is text and an html image for each page. We strip all the files except the jpgs and insert those one at a time into a branch or question page.

About 4 weeks ago I did a real UGLY maul/hack on importPPT.php. The short of it was I had to create a fake file for the slide order using old DOS tricks and change some string parameters in the code. I had a simple 10 page presentation, I was able to import the last page's image 10 times in a lesson automatically! That was the old importppt problems. The latest tweak got rid of that old problem, so I may go back to see how I hacked it. --Chris collman 2 21:43, 8 June 2006 (WST)