Refresh slide after master is changed programatically

Question

Hi,

If, while in the Normal view, I edit the text in a textbox (shape) on the SlideMaster with VBA, the change does not take effect on the screen until I go to another slide and back, or go to the master or notes views, and back to the normal view.

Is there a trick to get a slide to refresh after its slide master (that’s master, not layout) is modified by code?

I’m using this to change the textbox on the master slide:

    ActivePresentation.SlideMaster.Shapes("myShape").TextFrame.TextRange.Text = “New text”

Cheers

Rich

Answer 1

Assuming you have a reference to the slide in oSld:

Activewindow.View.GoToSlide(oSld.SlideIndex)

Basically, you go to the slide to force a refresh.  2007 has some bugs that may prevent that from working.  In that case, try moving a shape off the slide, refresh, then move it back, or add a shape, refresh, delete.

Answer 2

With ActivePresentation.SlideMaster.Shapes("ShapeName")

.TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "New Text"

.Apply

End With

Answer 3

.Apply would apply the last picked up format which is likely to give very unexpected results.

Answer 4

I recently found a similar refresh issue in the same view but during a long process that added elements to slides. During this process, I wanted to provide a progress indicator and since modeless forms are not supported by VBA6.5 (Mac) I decided to show the progress by adding a shape with text to the current slide.

The shape only appeared after the code had finished executing so I tried a huge combination of refresh techniques, including those above, yet none worked.

Finally, this simple delay insertion worked: (for simplicity, the code for each of the sub-procedures in the Main() procedure is omitted:

Private Sub Main()

' Show progress message on current slide

AddShapeToSlide

' Insert a delay of 0.1 seconds so that the above shape is visible on the slide at runtime

Delay 0.1

' Run Procedure 1

Procedure1

' Remove progress message

DeleteShapeFromSlide

End Sub

Private Sub Delay(Seconds As Single)

Dim TimeNow As Long

TimeNow = Timer

Do While Timer < TimeNow + Seconds

DoEvents

Loop

End Sub

I don't know why this works but it does.  It would be better to have a Repaint command for ActiveWindow like there is for forms.

Answer 5

Thanks Steve,

I had tried using:

    Activewindow.View.GoToSlide(ActiveWindow.View.Slide.SlideIndex)

but that didn't work... I think I was hitting the 2007 bug you mentioned.  I found just adding and deleting a shape worked:

    Dim ActiveSlide As Slide, shp As Shape

    Set ActiveSlide = ActivePresentation.Slides(ActiveWindow.View.Slide.SlideIndex)

    ActivePresentation.SlideMaster.Shapes("myShape").TextFrame.TextRange.Text = “New text”

'Refresh the screen by adding then deleting a shape:

    Set shp = ActiveSlide.Shapes.AddLine(0, 0, 0, 1)

    shp.Delete

Thanks again.

Cheers

Rich