Summary: You can remove a slide from a published presentation without having Articulate Presenter.
Difficulty: Medium
Help! I have lost my project files
Sometimes, the inevitable happens and you lose the original PowerPoint file that you used to create your project.
BUT you have the published files. And those published files are just great EXCEPT there is a reference on slide 15 that should just not be there. In fact, that whole slide should be taken out of the presentation. And slide 17 needs to be edited. The company logo has changed. Do I really need to recreate that 120 slide presentation just to make those edits?
Do I need my project files to make an edit to my presentation?
Well the official answer is yes. If you want to edit your presentation, you need your original project files and that includes your PowerPoint file. However, the unofficial answer is that you just might be able to get away with not having your originals. In fact, if you just want to remove a slide, you don’t even need Articulate Presenter.
Example
Here is a sample presentation.
We want to remove the second slide which makes reference to a company.
When Articulate Presenter publishes your PowerPoint presentation, it actually publishes a series of SWF files, one file for each slide and some other SWF files for the background. How those SWF files are referenced and joined together is partly defined in an xml file called presentation.xml. You can find this file in the data folder in the published files folder.
Notice how each slide is referenced between the tags for each slide, Slide id=”1″ etc.
Our presentation.xml file will now look like this:
This is enough to remove that second slide. Here is the same demo as above but with that section of the code removed from the presentation.xml file. Of course, the second slide has completely disappeared just leaving the other two slides and the playlist functioning as normal.
View Revised Demo
If you want to make sure that your presentation is as light as possible, you will want to delete those files corresponding to your deleted slide.
Conclusion
If you want to add a new slide to the presentation, you would need to prepare the slide in PowerPoint, publish it with Articulate Presenter, and then transfer the corresponding SWF files to the published files folder of your original presentation. You would also need to edit the presentation.xml file to reference your new slide.
[...] Previous developer didn’t provide project files I wrote a little article about editing a published presentation without the project files which you might find useful [...]
[...] This article plays with the presentation.xml to remove a page and speaks about adding one too. How to Remove a Slide from a Published Presentation Regards __________________ Dave Moxon ********************************* Customer Support [...]
We’re attempting to remove a slide (title slide) and insert a new one as you describe in your blog. However, when we open the data folder, then the presentation.xml file, it’s opening in internet explorer and we’re not able to make any modifications to it. Are we missing a step?
Hi Sandy, You’ll need to open the presentation.xml file with Wordpad or Notepad rather than Internet Explorer. Right-click on the file and then select “Open with”. If Wordpad or Notepad aren’t listed, select “Choose default program” and then browse to the Windows directory on your C:drive and click on notepad.exe or wordpad.exe and then ok. You’ll then be able to select Notepad or Wordpad to open the file and do the edits as explained. Get back if it doesn’t work.
Noticed in the second demo that the thumbnail for Slide 3 shows the thumbnail for the previously removed Slide 2. Maybe there’s some other XML to control that?
I’m trying to find a way to export the Presenter content as XML for localization. The problem with presentation.xml is that the CDATA sections for the content are not apparently used (e.g. the content is hard-coded into the SWF files, not dynamically pulled in at runtime.
Can anyone verify this?
Thanks shrimppop. I forgot to remove the tb2.swf in the uploaded demo. However, I actually see that just removing it will not cause the right thumbnail to appear. The thumbnails correspond to the order in the presentation, so in my example above, I need to change the name of tb3.swf to tb2.swf for it to work. I have done that as you will now see in the demo.
Regarding your second point, I’ll do some research and get back to you.
Hi, Dave
I’m having the same problem as shrimppop: the presentation.xml file gives you the impression you can change the slide text on the fly, but in actual fact you can’t… or maybe there’s something in the player templates which may let you do it…
Anyway, would be grateful for any thoughts.
Hi Dragos,
It might have been possible to change the text on a slide with Presenter 5 (I cannot double check this right now) but it is certainly not possible in Presenter ’09 and apologies for misleading you here. I have taken the line out from the article. Dave
Hi,
This is a slightly different query regarding editing the presentation.xml file. I have noticed that all of my imbedded video is clipped at the end of each slide by a second or so. I notice that there is a setting for in the presentation.xml file and have tried to change it.
This does increase the duration of the slide on the slidebar but as soon as the video ends, the presenter stops and doesn’t proceed to the next slide.
is there a solution to this? Apparently upgrading will resolve the issue but I’d like to improve the clipping of previously published lectures.
thanks
Elspeth
thanks for you suggestions
Elspeth