Adding field support to MS PowerPoint

I’ve been working on a series of videos about an unpublished app of mine called FlipStream, and I wanted to easily insert some information about the current PowerPoint presentation on the first slide. Sadly, PowerPoint doesn’t have a generic field replacement function like Word does. So, either I type some stuff and have to remember to change it every time I make a new presentation, or I write my own field replacement logic. For the true hacker, there is no contest: time to dust off the old VBA reference.

My goal is to add some handlebar-style references to the text in my slides and then look up the associated document properties using VBA. In the PowerPoint Presentation object there are a couple of properties that we can take advantage of to populate our fields: BuiltInDocumentProperties and CustomDocumentProperties.

For reference, the BuiltInDocumentProperties property recognizes the following property names:

It also adds a custom property that gives the time that the presentation was started:

• Presentation start time

So, given those lists, I could create a slide that looks like this:

And when I start the presentation, it would look like this:

So, to do this substitution, we need to be notified whenever a presentation is starting or ending. We can accomplish this by writing event handlers for the PowerPoint Application object. In this case, we want to handle the SlideShowBegin and SlideShowEnd events. The pseudocode for this process looks like:

for each slide:
    for each shape:
       if shape contains text and text contains a field reference {{:
           preserve original text in Tags
           replace text with contents of properties

Then, when the presentation is over, the cleanup process is:

for each slide:
    for each shape:
        if shape has original text in Tags:
            restore original text
            delete Tag

This was all pretty straightforward, and I was able to get it working quickly. But in the end, the most challenging part of this process was actually registering my event handlers when my presentation opens! I’m guessing it’s partially a byproduct of security concerns and partially inertia, but it isn’t possible to have any VBA code execute when a PowerPoint presentation is loaded. So, after a lot of searching, I decided to put my tag code into a PowerPoint Add-in.

The documentation for developing a PowerPoint Add-in is pretty spotty, but the key thing is that when an Add-in is loaded, PowerPoint calls the following two subroutines:

Sub Auto_Open()
    ' initialization code goes here
End Sub

Sub Auto_Close()
    ' cleanup code goes here
End Sub

The only other (minor) challenge is the logistics of developing and debugging an Add-in. I’m delivering my Add-in as a .ppam file, but once you’ve saved your Add-in as a .ppam file, you can no longer edit it directly. So I did all of my development in a .pptm (PowerPoint Macro-Enabled Presentation) file and then used Save As to save as a .ppam file for testing. You will probably need to use the File/Options/Add-ins dialog to remove your plug-in before you can overwrite the file for another testing round. That function is somewhat hidden in the Manage: PowerPoint Add-ins drop-down.

I’ve made the code available under the MIT license on GitHub. Enjoy!