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 MS PowerPoint 2000 and 2002 but not 2003. 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)

More notes from chris: Created a simple PowerPoint2003 with 5 slides, no page numbers. Was able to open it in PowerPoint2000 and save it again in that format. All Powerpoints had a text box for the title. Page 1 only had a graphic. Page 2 a second text box. Page 3 the second text box contained 3 levels of bullets (used circles). Page 4 the second text box contained 2 levels of bullets and there was a graphic image bottom right. Page 4 the second text box contained underlined text. PowerPoint2000 did the best job. PowerPoint2003 added a the text "#8226" in front of the text in the second text box. Position of graphic varied but both versions imported it. Also discovered that PowerPoint sometimes keeps deleted page images which show up in the web folder (Thanks Bill)! The underlined format did not import into the last page. Agree with Todd 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)