VSTO Add-In to automatically export custom PowerPoint slide shows

Question

One of the groups in my company works on a very large PowerPoint slide deck. Not all of the slides in this deck are relevant to everyone. The purpose of this deck is to have a singular source of material which people can pick and choose slides depending the type of presentation that is needed. The slide deck has a number of pre-defined custom slide shows to make this process easier.

While this solution works well in many cases, we need a simple way to quickly export a Custom Show to a new presentation. I'm aiming to develop a VSTO add-in that will allow a user to select one or more custom slide shows and then export the slide shows to their desktop and I'm looking for some code to help get me on my way.

Does anyone know how to export an existing Custom Show to a new presentation? Better yet, is there a way to allow users to select and export one or more existing shows?

Answer 1

This works a treat! careful to create a copy of the file first!

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00893.htm

Answer 2

Great question, I've wanted to do this myself for a long time, so took the time to figure it out for you (and me!).

Basically, you'll want to a) loop through all NamedSlideShows, b) find their slides by SlideID, c) add a new presentation and then d) copy over the NamedSlideShow slides with the original design. You can do this for one or all Custom Shows, based on how you send in the commands.

Here's an example:

Sub FindShows()
    Dim p As PowerPoint.Presentation
    Set p = PowerPoint.ActivePresenation
    Dim cShow As PowerPoint.NamedSlideShow
    For Each cShow In p.SlideShowSettings.NamedSlideShows
        SaveCustomShow (cShow.Name, p)
    Next
End Sub

The FindShows sub just finds all Custom Shows in the ActivePresentation and sends them to a routine that will create the each new presenation based on the specified Custom Show name. You can customize this as needed.

This routine below is the heart of it. There are a couple of things to note:

• To send over the slide design of the source slide, you have to explicity set the copied slide to use that design.

• A NamedSlideShow will only give you the SlideID of the slides within it. You can use FindBySlideID to then identify that slide in the original presentation - it returns a slide object. Then you simply copy it and paste it with the design of the original.

  Sub SaveCustomShow(showName As String, p As Presentation)
      Dim cShows As PowerPoint.NamedSlideShows
      Set cShows = p.SlideShowSettings.NamedSlideShows
      Dim cSlideIDs As Variant
      cSlideIDs = cShows(showName).SlideIDs
      Dim destinationPath As String
      destinationPath = "C:\Temp\"
      Dim newP As PowerPoint.Presentation
      Set newP = PowerPoint.Presentations.Add(WithWindow:=False)
      With newP
          .SaveAs destinationPath & cShows(showName).Name
          Dim s As PowerPoint.Slide
          Dim e As Integer
          For e = 1 To UBound(cSlideIDs)
              Set s = p.Slides.FindBySlideID(SlideID:=cSlideIDs(e))
              s.Copy
              .Slides.Paste.Design = s.Design
          Next
         .Save
         .Close
      End With
      Set newP = Nothing
  End Sub
  

There's not any error checking in the code, so that will need to be worked out, but it works like a charm!