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PowerPoint and programmatically extracting each slide

Anonymous
2020-12-12T19:23:11+00:00

Greetings,

I'm working on a process to take a PowerPoint deck and extract slides from it so they can be used in other presentations.

For background:

Back in the early 90s, while working at Microsoft, we had a share location called "Shows-R-Us" which housed hundreds of slide decks. You could search the decks for specific topics like Windows or C++, for example.  You could then browse, thumbnail style, through slides to pick ones that would be useable in whatever deck you were trying to build.

In my place, we have 100s of PP decks and I want to make a more modern version of Show-R-Us that does the same thing.

I'm not, at all clear, on the APIs or hooks into PP to allow for this to happen.  The user would have one screen and could search on tags/keyword and, well, like the above.  I also need to build a ingestion process that will take in all the decks I have and give the user who is adding them to the collective, the opportunity to tag the presention.

Anybody doing anything like this?  Any pointers or places to look for this type of PP documentation if it exists?

Thanks and stay safe!

Rick

Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For home | Windows

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  1. Steve Rindsberg 99,161 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2020-12-14T16:35:50+00:00

    There's some sample code for extracting slides here:

    https://powerpointprogram.indezine.com/2019/10/powerpoint-vba-export-slides-to-single-slide-presentations.html?doing\_wp\_cron=1607962525.6507959365844726562500

    There's also a PublishSlides method that  purportedly will save a single slide out of a presentation.

    I have it on good authority that it works for some folks; I've never been able to get it to work myself, though.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-12-14T22:50:58+00:00

    Hi Steve,

    Thanks very much.  Super helpful.  I know what I'm doing for my holiday coding project!

    Rick

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-12T21:09:01+00:00

    Hi Steve,

    Thanks for the feedback.  I'd be fine with giving people an app or even as the dude in charge sit on my desktop and just start building the internal db of the slides.  The first order of business is to see about getting slides extracted from a presentation.  Once I can figure that out, I'll at least have an asset to play with.

    Thank again,

    Rick

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  4. Steve Rindsberg 99,161 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2020-12-12T20:36:46+00:00

    One issue might be the problem of automating PPT on the server (not supported by MS) to do the work.

    An alternate approach might be to give the person providing the presentation an add-in that'd run on their desktop PPT, allow them to provide tags and at upload time, would split the presentation into individual, one PPTX-one-slide presentations AND a JPG preview so visitors to the web site would have something to look at.

    I've actually written something very like this for a client; the results were images that ended up on a site that hosted custom show-creation features rather than returning a PPT file.

    I suspect that an add-in on the user's desktop might be able to retrieve, say, a data file/spreadsheet with the names of the selected slides (or actually the URLs of the PPT files, so that it could download them and assemble them into a final presentation.

    That would at least keep the PPT automation portion off the server.

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