Hi Anders. Thanks again for the detailed reply. Last night I did what you recommend in A1-A2. I realised that while this allows a transparent flash object over a bitmap say, like in your demonstration, it's no different in practice (visual result) to just having the bitmap included in the flash file itself. What I was after was a flash-showing object that was flexible and transparent and could be used in conjunction (overlaid) with other all the other PowerPoint features. This isn't possible and appears to be a limitation of PowerPoint. I've realised that searching for workarounds to this by focusing on transparent swfs using a HTML object was a red herring. In other words, putting all objects in a HTML object on the slide isn't a work around, because that HTML object is itself not transparent and thus cannot be used in conjunction with underlying objects etc. in PowerPoint. This is a shame, but in terms of design, can be worked around to an extent to provide only minor limitations in what I would like to do in PP. One good thing I learned though is how to insert a webpage into a PP presentation.