I was in the process of writing up a PowerPoint that discussed Flex 4 States, Styling & Skinning and merely wanted to add an example states SWF to the document (rather than switch out of PowerPoint during the presentation and over to a browser to view the example) and much to my dismay found out it wasn’t that easy!

After trying to figure it out myself through the tool, I eventually had to resort to several Google searches for my answer. I landed on this page tucked away deep in Microsoft’s Support libraries: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291875, which reads:

PowerPoint 2007
Make sure that the Flash Player is installed on the computer. Then, follow these steps:

1. In PowerPoint, display in normal view the slide on which you want to play the animation.
2. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click PowerPoint Options.
3. Click Popular, and then click to select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box under Top options for working with PowerPoint, and then click OK.
4. On the Developer tab, click More Controls in the Controls group.
5. In the list of controls, click Shockwave Flash Object, click OK, and then drag on the slide to draw the control.
6. Resize the control by dragging the sizing handles.
7. Right-click the Shockwave Flash Object, and then click Properties.
8. On the Alphabetic tab, click the Movie property.
9. In the value column (the blank cell next to Movie), type the full drive path, including the file name (for example, C\:MyFile.swf) or uniform resource locator (URL) to the Flash file that you want to play.

Make sure you resize the control to the visual layout of the embedded SWF (otherwise you’ll see some oddly colored “whitespace” around the SWF).

Anyway, I tried these steps and was successful. Hopefully this also saves someone else some time