A lot of legacy learning content is in PowerPoint format and it is natural that e-learning course authors want to leverage or re-use this content. The earlier versions of Captivate allowed users to import their PowerPoint content into their Captivate projects. Now Captivate 4 goes much further- Cp4 now supports full round-tripping with the PowerPoint content.
It supports collaborative authoring with the SME’s who use PowerPoint. Detailed below are some key aspects of this powerful feature:

– You can import PowerPoint slides to Captivate, and then enhance these slides by adding audio, animations, video or other Captivate objects to each of the slides. In the meantime your co-author can keep editing the slides using MS PowerPoint. You can synch your Captivate project with the latest version of the PowerPoint slide deck using the ‘update’ feature (Window > Library and select the presentation, right-clik and do “update”) . The Captivate objects which you added earlier on-top of the initial version of the PowerPoint slides remain intact (while Captivate updates to the changes your co-author made using PowerPoint). The workflow becomes even more powerful if you keep this PowerPoint file in a shared location, eliminating the need of sending back the file to Captivate user.

– Note that this feature works for both .ppt and .pptx files. This is being clarified here as I saw many articles describing this as possible only in PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files. .ppt and .pptx are handled in the same manner in Captivate 4.

– These posts give some more insight into the feature: PowerPoint Linked vs Embedded Import, Best practices for handling PowerPoint audio in Captivate, Correct dimensions for Power Point Import, PowerPoint On-Click Animations

– Captivate help is also a good resource for the feature.

– This tutorial gives a lot of details.