Code files for Power Point?

  • Thread starter Thread starter katanna
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katanna

OK, I am going to give you the long story first, thent the simple
question afterwards.

I work for a church, and thought it would be a good idea to write a
program to handle the Poewr Point presentations we do (words to songs,
scripture, ect.). Because I have basic knowlege of c++, I thought
that, if possible, I could write a program to write files for PP.

The way I see it happening (and I have no idea if any of this is
possible) is to have the program ask you the songs, scriptues for that
week, ect, and it would generate a text file and name it .ppt, and have
PP read it like normal.

OK, short question: Is there any way to have a program write a file
for PP, and/or is there already a program out there that will do this.

One of the reasons that I want to do this is that I am on a Mac, and I
don't have PP. If I could code it on my Mac, than I could just save
the .ppt file to a disk and never have to mess with PP directly.

Hope I am not too confusing. Please aks if I am.

Matthew
 
Hi Matthew,

If you built a PowerPoint file without PowerPoint, would that be ethical?

--
Regards,

Glen Millar
Microsoft PPT MVP
http://www.powerpointworkbench.com/
Please tell us your ppt version, and get back to us here
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I would say, "no". The reason being that the PowerPoint file format is
proprietary and undocumented to the unannointed (new word?). The way I do
this (take text and build slides) is to automate PowerPoint to build the
presentation as such:
1. I create a new presentation.
2. I open an existing single slide presentation (I call it a template) that
has text boxes where I want the text.
3. I read the text from a file and insert in the text box adding as many
slides as necessary to fit all the text.
4. I save the new presentation.

Having tried both, it would probably be much easier to do in VB than C++.

You do need PowerPoint installed on the machine to do this.
 
*If you built a PowerPoint file without PowerPoint, would that be
ethical?*
Click to expand...
I can't tell if you are kidding or not.
I don't see why it would not be ethical. I am not using the software,
simply saving text files that are in the format that the program uses.
*The way I do
this (take text and build slides) is to automate PowerPoint to build
the
presentation as such:
1. I create a new presentation.
2. I open an existing single slide presentation (I call it a
template) that
has text boxes where I want the text.
3. I read the text from a file and insert in the text box adding as
many
slides as necessary to fit all the text.
4. I save the new presentation.*
Click to expand...
That is my backup plan. I was just wondering if the code was
documented, but I guess not.
* Having tried both, it would probably be much easier to do in VB than
C++.*
Click to expand...
The ONLY reason that I would use c++ is that I know how to write in
c++.

Matthew
 
"katanna"
OK, I am going to give you the long story first, thent the simple
question afterwards.

I work for a church, and thought it would be a good idea to write a
program to handle the Poewr Point presentations we do (words to songs,
scripture, ect.). Because I have basic knowlege of c++, I thought
that, if possible, I could write a program to write files for PP.
Click to expand...


In order to do this you would need to know the file format for PPT and that
isn't going to happen. (MS does not release this information.)

Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team
 
Actually, Word (or even Notepad, for that matter) will give you a good
outline, one which PPT can interpret into slides. You could put a front
end on that, I'd think, and let it do the job for you. Or maybe an
Access database would be easier?

At any rate, with Word, you'd want to use styles when setting up your
text. PPT interprets Word styles in the following manner:

Word Style --> PPT
Heading 1 --> Slide Title
Heading 2 --> Primary Bullet
Heading 3 --> Secondary Bullet

etc.

Maybe that will give you some ideas.
 
As others have pointed out, the format of the PP binary is not publicly
available. Further, it is a binary format, and one cannot take a text
file and just rename it as a .ppt file.

What you can do is create a text file and have a VBA macro merge the
file into an existing PP 'template' -- either in design mode (Echo's
suggestion) or during the slideshow itself. On my site there is an add-
in called 'Textbox from file' that I wrote in response to a request
from someone what wanted to show *random* text snippets in church.

Depending on your comfort level with VBA event programming you can
probably duplicate the functionality without the random component.

FWIW, no one has contacted me about that add-in. So, I assume that
(a) it meets the needs of everyone who has tried it.
Ha! Not likely
(b) no one knows of its existence.
More likely
(c) there is no real need for a program like that.
Even more likely in that the program satisfies a very niche
requirement and that market falls in (b) above.

--
Regards,

Tushar Mehta, MS MVP -- Excel
www.tushar-mehta.com
Excel, PowerPoint, and VBA add-ins, tutorials
Custom MS Office productivity solutions
 
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