Sometimes it makes sense to create an animation in Flash and then to embed it in PowerPoint. Here are some instructions I wrote up a while back. The screen grabs are from an earlier version of PowerPoint, but PowerPoint 2007 looks the same.
1). Go to the slide where you want the Flash animation to appear. It’s helpful, though not necessary, to place the Flash movie in the same directory with the PowerPoint presentation. That way you don’t have to worry about the path.
2) Right click in the toolbar area to make the “Control” toolbox visible.
3) Click the icon that looks like a hammer (”More controls”).
4) A menu of controls appears. Scroll past the “Macromedia Flash Object” down to the “Shockwave Flash” object (hit the ‘S” key a few times).
5) At this point, PowerPoint will present you with a crosshair cursor. Use it to draw a rectangle. Set the rectangle to the size you want your Flash movie to play at.
6) Now you need to set properties for the Flash movie. Click the “custom” item at the top of the properties list (ppt 2003) or the “properties” icon at the top left of the control toobox (earlier versions). This will pop up a dialog box containing the essential settings. The settings shown here work well. You don’t have to embed the movie, but if you do, you won’t have to worry about PowerPoint forgetting the path.
7) Save the presentation and run it in slide show view.
Getting Flash movies to work in PowerPoint is no problem, but they don’t rewind to the beginning reliably, so it’s a good idea to put a rewind button (or other interactive controls) in the Flash preso.
If the Flash movie is interactive you’ll need to click away from it, on the slide, to give keyboard control back to PowerPoint.
Here’s a PowerPoint Presentation with Flash in it. The animation is a simple step-through illustration of the putative advantages of outsourcing globalization and internationalization services.