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Making Documents Viewable Online with Macromedia FlashPaper 2

Using FlashPaper from Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel

There is very little you need to do to make excellent use of FlashPaper with Microsoft Office (see Figure 2). Simply open the document and choose FlashPaper > Convert to Macromedia Flash (.swf) if you want Flash, or FlashPaper > Convert to PDF if you want PDF.

Figure 2. Converting an Office document to FlashPaper or PDF.

If you want your document to retain any outlines you have created in Word, select FlashPaper > Options and make sure Include Outlines is checked in the Options dialog box.

Creating PDFs with FlashPaper

In addition to Flash files, FlashPaper allows you to convert any printable file to PDF. Now, you ask, why would you want to do this when Flash is so great? As much as we like Flash, it is not the superior choice in every case. Each format has its own benefits; in particular situations, PDF is in fact the correct format, which is why we provided that choice to users.

Here are a few situations when you should choose PDF over Flash:

• E-mailing or downloading a document: FlashPlayer is currently set up to work only inside the web browser on most end-user systems. It will not open files that are sent in e-mail or that you download from a website. Adobe Reader, alternatively, can open up a PDF that has been downloaded or sent by e-mail.
• Securing a document: PDF natively supports encryption and password-protection; FlashPaper does not. However, FlashPaper can create PDF documents that use 128-bit encryption, so when you send out sensitive information, FlashPaper protects it.
• PDF workflow: Many organizations have built workflows around the PDF document format. Using or requiring another format would make those systems more complex or costly.

Printing to FlashPaper

To convert your document to FlashPaper from any application using the Print command:

1. Open the file you want to convert to FlashPaper in the application that originally created it.
2. Choose File > Print (the option that opens a Print dialog box rather than prints the document immediately).
3. In the Print dialog box, choose Macromedia FlashPaper as the printer name and click OK (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Printing a document to FlashPaper.

When the document is finished processing, you will see a preview of the document (see Figure 4). Choose File > Save as Macromedia Flash to save the file as a Flash file (.swf), or Save as PDF to save the file as a PDF.

Figure 4. Previewing a FlashPaper document.

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