Importing your PowerPoint slides into Captivate is as easy as 1-2-3! Simply follow the steps in this blog.

However, there may be circumstances when the dimensions of the imported PowerPoint slides do not match properly with Captivate slides. The difference in the dimensions could very well corrode the experience of a learner, especially when he/she sees stretched or shrunken objects in the project.

The dimensions of a slide in Captivate are defined in pixels, whereas Power Point defines slide size in inches.

You can create a new project “From MS Power Point” – Here you don’t have to worry about the dimensions, as Captivate creates a project of same dimension as your Power Point (yes it calculates correctly!). You can see this dimension while importing.

You might need to just consider whether this is the required dimension for your target audience.

You might also want to Import a Power Point presentation to an existing project. Captivate’s behavior in such a scenario is to resize the Power Point presentation to the dimension of your project. In many cases, this resizing is undesirable due to (possible but not always) loss of quality. So, Captivate gives a warning (which you can of course ignore).

One option is to resize the original PowerPoint presentation so that it matches your existing Captivate project dimensions.

Convert pixels to inches

On a standard Windows display set to 96 Dots per Inch (DPI), simply divide the PowerPoint dimensions by 96 and you get the value in inches. For example, if you want to set the dimensions of the Captivate slides to 1024 x 768 pixels, it is recommended that you set the dimensions of the PPT slides to (1024/96, 768/96)=10.67 x 8 inches.

Change the PowerPoint dimensions

Modify the dimensions of your Power Point presentation to 10.67 x 8 inches. In PowerPoint 2016, click the Design tab, and click Slide Size > Custom Slide Size to launch the Slide Size dialog. Enter your custom values in the fields provided. It would be a good idea to check whether your font sizes, objects etc are appropriate for the new dimension.

Now, import your PPT slides into Captivate without worrying about size issues.

Read this blog for best practices of importing a PPT into Captivate.