Creating a PowerPoint Style Presentation in Flash: Pt. 1 Support

Flash is a great alternative to PowerPoint when it comes to creating on-screen presentations. Presentations created in Flash are usually significantly smaller than those created in PowerPoint, especially where narrations and other sounds are included. Furthermore, the presentation graphics are normally vector-based so you won't ruin the look a Flash presentation by resizing it! It is also easy to add a Flash presentation to your Web site or to a CD-ROM.

This tutorial is the first of a two part series. In the first part, we'll create a presentation using one of the standard templates that ships with Flash. Since we can customise the look and feel of these templates as well as extending them with ActionScript, here we'll extend the presentation by adding rewind and fast forward buttons, including a slide counter that can also be used for navigation and adding a progress bar.

In the second article, we'll add the same keyboard shortcuts that are available in PowerPoint. We'll also create a presentation template. We'll finish by creating a kiosk-style presentation that runs automatically using the setInterval action.

I've assumed that you understand basic ActionScript commands and that you're comfortable adding these to your Flash movies. In the first part of the tutorial, we'll work with some of the events and properties associated with buttons and use input text fields. In part two, we'll learn about keyboard listeners and setInterval.

This tutorial come with a complete code download.