Recently, I encounter problem with flash element embedded inside PowerPoint. Odd problem, if I may add.

If I open a PowerPoint file with flash movie already embeded in it, the flash movie won't. Upon openning the PowerPoint I got a warning message saying that some controls can't be activated.

What really odd is if I create a new PowerPoint presentation file and embed the flash object myself, it works perfectly.

My colleagues said that they encountered the same problem and they solved it by updating the Flash player to the latest version (Adobe Flash player 9).

So I tried that. Restarted my computer. Didn't work.

I thought maybe somehow the player got mixed up with the older version because I have Flash 8 installed on this machine. So I uninstalled Flash 8, then tried to install the new player again. Same result.

Today I finally stumbled upon the solution. I was trying to access MSN Video by clicking on a link from Windows Live messenger and I got an error page saying that I don't have Flash player installed on my machine.

I know for sure I have it installed because I can see flash ads when I browse the web.

Apparently what happened was I have the flash player installed for Firefox, but not for IE because I accessed the download page by using Firefox. PowerPoint uses the player(ActiveX component) that's installed  for IE. So the connection is …both are Microsoft's products.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 7:11 pm and is filed under work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.