About the Author

Eduardo N. Sanchez is a Brazilian Chemical Engineer with a long-time penchant for computers. Since college he has been programming using languages such as Fortran, Basic, Algol, Pascal, C and most recently VBA.

Eduardo enjoys answering Excel and Office questions at Internet forums, as this is a great way to get in touch with topics that could otherwise remain unnoticed. When he is not tackling a computational challenge with electronic music in the background, Eduardo likes to watch Star Trek episodes and play with the family’s Dachshund.

He is also the author of Excel and the World Wide Web – Straight to the Point.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my editor Bill Jelen for embarking in a project which is not focused on our beloved Excel…

Thanks also to all blog posters and Internet site owners who share valuable technical knowledge for free; even the most experienced user will benefit from reading well-constructed articles. After retirement I plan to build my own little programming corner online…

Finally, thanks to my family for being always supportive on all my endeavors, and to my co-workers and Web posters who keep me on my toes by asking PowerPoint questions of varying difficulty levels.

Code used in this book

The code examples are available for download at

https://www.mrexcel.com/download-center/powerpoint-with-vba-5762/

1 Basic Operations

Introduction

There is a joke saying that PowerPoint is a free application that comes along when you buy Excel…

Actually, PowerPoint is a complex program that offers everything you need to create and manage professionally built presentations.

This book assumes you are already a PowerPoint user who wants to automate and enhance your presentations using Visual Basic for Applications, which is currently the Office programming language. It is also a pre-requisite that you have basic knowledge on how VBA works, as we do not have room here to teach it from the ground up.

We will review some concepts, but the main goal of this book will be to show how VBA can make PowerPoint even better. Welcome aboard!

Creating a simple presentation

Our first example is quite straightforward: the code generates a new presentation with six slides, each one containing a title and a bulleted list. The picture below shows the final result. Observe that the chosen layout contains two shapes; the first one will hold the slide title whereas the second will be used for the list.

Sub AddSlides()

Dim Pre As Presentation, sld As Slide, i%, j%

Set Pre = Presentations.Add(msoTrue)

j = 1

For i = 1 To 6

Set sld = Pre.Slides.Add(Index:=Pre.Slides.Count + 1, Layout:=ppLayoutText)

sld.Shapes(1).TextFrame.TextRange = Title of Slide &i

sld.Shapes(2).TextFrame.TextRange = Line &CStr(j) &vbNewLine& _

Line &CStr(j + 1) &vbNewLine& Line &CStr(j + 2) &vbNewLine

j = j + 3

Next

End Sub

This presentation was created with VBA

Where is the macro recorder?

Excel programmers know of this handy tool that records actions and generates the corresponding code. It often requires adjustments, but will give you the necessary properties and methods for that particular task. For example, if you format some text with the recorder turned on, it will give you VBA code that you can play back to do the same job again.

Unfortunately, since PowerPoint 2007 Microsoft removed this functionality from the program.

Object Browser and Intellisense

Two features that will help finding needed properties and methods are the object browser window and the so called Intellisense menu.

To activate the object browser view, just press the F2 key when in the VB editor; you will see something similar to the image beneath. It can be used to browse the object tree and search for the available elements. To return to the code window, press F7.

Choose a class to see a list of its members

Another useful feature is the dropdown menu that appears when you type a period after an object in the VB editor. It will list most of the valid properties and methods you can use with that specific object. To make sure this option is active,