!Restored: Export for PowerPoint

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have some usefull suggestions on how to incorporate ArchiCAD plan images into PowerPoint?

Creating a imagefile like JPG,TIFF etc. offers not enough quality. Publishing an EPS gives no image in PP and PDF can't be inserted in PP(2000) unless using a link and opening it in Acrobat reader which is not an option. So far only save the plan as a Windows enhanced Metafile seems to give a reasonable result, but I was wondering if there are more options.

[Anonymous]

Dwight wrote:
The advantage to crossfading stills is that notes can be inserted at appropriate pauses - when you get to an important place, you pause there for discussion.

I never do "movies" : I've found that rendering a flythrough / around / sun study frame by frame is much more efficient : when presenting to clients, you can scroll from frame to frame to get "near movie quality" animation, but clients usually are not interested in the movement : they want to see details and what they'll get from different point of view.

I've never added comments in some frames of a rendering but this seems rather a good idea...

How do you make your smooth crossfading ? Powerpoint ?

[Dwight]

At least we know what not to use now 😉 !

That was quite an outburst that needs clarification:

Initially it looked like Acrobat was the way to go - certainly, three years ago a passable presentation could be done from pages originally set up to be paper. We were all showing off things from books we had written and the transition was simple - except that the dense text of a book never translates to the screen.

A recent Adobe seminar used PDF pages, but they were being shown on bigbox Macs with plenty of Video RAM. The point was to show how animations could be built into these pages, originally designed in Adobe Illustrator for print.

The Keynote and PwerPoint applications make multi-media more fluidly composed and inherantly more aniimated. And need less video RAM to do it.

[stefan]

Our architectural Students are doing presentations very regularily. Probably more then professional Architects do. In fact, I did no presentations after school anymore, while I was working as an architect. Hadn't touched Powerpoint for 4 years (never had a need) untill I returned at the university.

There is a tendency with our students to switch to Flash, as it is both a presentation & webdesign tool and most of them are getting fluid with it.
Plus, it's available for Mac & PC and the presentations are mostly vectorial (the text and drawings, not the images of course), so it scales reasonably well and animates rather fluent.

But be careful before you jump ships, it is a whole new toolset. And don't forget you can get very far and "designerly" with Powerpoint as well, if you avoid the typical default templates and bullets and colors.

Bytheway, I use Swish, which is a lowcost (PC-only) alternative to Flash. It costed me $50 for a full version (I did an upgrade from a Lite version, which I got for free, but since SwishMax is released, the new price for Swish2.0 is only $50). They have fully functional demoes to try. The demo mangles your text to turn it unusable, but you can get a good taste.

It is not as extensive as Flash, but it'll get the job done. SwishMax is the newest version which added scripting and Forms, but most presentations can be done just fine with the Swish 2.0 version and even the Swish Lite (1.5) is usable and it's only $20.

http://www.swishzone.com

[Dwight]

How do you make your smooth crossfading ? Powerpoint ?

In both Powerpoint and Keynote individual "slides" can transition using cross fading. The basic crossfade in Powerpoint is a rather klunky bunch of boxes that scumble around to simulate a crossfade, but later editions include a smooth Quicktime transiton that is cinematic in quality, like Keynote's.

Also, these presentations can be exported as QuickTime movies to play like animations - not the best, but something that can be sent away....

[Dwight]

And of course, Powerpoint can create a self-contained slide show that is quite compact in size, set to play automatically when started.

[Haneef Tayob]

This is quite an old topic (so it might have been answered somewhere else)
I simply use the copy-paste option. You can select the elements before copying or use the marquee to isolate a specific area.
If you paste this into Powerpoint, the result is a vector format which is easily scalable and cropped. I prefer not expting plans and sectiosn to tiff's or jpegs as the vector option is much clearer and with smaller files.

[Haneef Tayob]

Haneef wrote:
I simply use the copy-paste option. You can select the elements before copying or use the marquee to isolate a specific area.
If you paste this into Powerpoint, the result is a vector format which is easily scalable and cropped.

Why can't I do this anymore in ArchiCad11
Any suggestion of a workaround?
The simple 'copy from AC then paste to Powerpoint' I used to do since AC6 does not seem to work in AC11. I've tried testing by opening older files in AC10 and the feature works.

[Erika Epstein]

Have you tried copy and pasting using the edit menu instead of shortcut keys?
Sometimes that makes a difference.

[Haneef Tayob]

Erika wrote:
Have you tried copy and pasting using the edit menu instead of shortcut keys?
Sometimes that makes a difference.

Tried it, still does not seem to copy items to Windows clipboard