Inserting content into a lesson activity

A common question. "We have many course documents in Word and PDF format at the moment. We ant to put them in a lesson, where 1 chapter would be 1 lesson. Is there anyway to easily do this and retain the formatting, esp around screenshots with arrows and description around them?"

The only import option is powerpoint (and if you are using Moodle version 1.9 or below this basically doesn't work anyway).
Create some image files of your pdf or word document converted to pdf.
Create some image files of your PowerPoint and insert those
Reference the PDF for a lesson by the "pop to file or web page" option
Convert your pdf files a movie files
Do not have lessons, use a word or pdf file as a resource, use conditional activities to link it to a quiz that is loaded with feedback to each question

Creating manageable PDFs

PDF files can be split into chapters. There are free "pdf splitter" utilities that will do this. Google "pdf splitter" and you'll find a bunch. In your situation, you might want to attach the chapter as a resource in this form. You can also, obviously split the PDF more granularly (if that's a word?) than chapter, and some of the utilities probably have a feature to automatically split all the pages.

The quality of the resulting small PDFs is usually higher than the same PDF exported as an image. Your PDF can be referenced by the lesson in the "pop-to file or web page" option, or as a URL - you obviously need to host the PDF on your Moodle site.

Copy and pasting Word into Moodle

Word does add hidden formatting to be copied when it is pasted into Moodle directly. There are solutions.

Start by using Word's "File> Save As > Filtered HTML" option. This had different names in different versions of Word, but basically gets rid of a lot of the Word-specific junk. This does a fair job in the context of Moodle.

Next you could run a utility on this to make it better. For some free tools search for "clean word html" on the web. The "granddaddy" of these tools is HTMLTidy.

At this point you have a really good html document as your source.

Use the "popup to file or web page" for the lesson to reference that "chapter" (IOW host the HTML you created; see next point).
Add the file as a URL resource if you host what you have created (NB: do *not* forget the folder of images that is created in tandem with the HTML file)
Copy and paste into the Moodle editor after opening the cleaned HTML in Word or browser

Tip: you will probably have to reload the images

Documentation

Inserting content into a lesson activity

Creating manageable PDFs

Copy and pasting Word into Moodle

See also