Question

Hi Guys : I wanted to create a power point presentation using a raw text file, so that i can rapidly edit the file and see the results, gauranteed with uniform formatting. Basically, I’m talking about separating the data content from the presentation.

How can I do this ? Im thinking that maybe Latex could be a choice. I’ve also seen that there are API’s for Powerpoint and open office presentations.

Answer 1

Powerpoint exposes it’s API via COM – which makes it possible to do (almost) anything that you can do in the GUI in any programming language that supports COM. The difficulty is that the API changes between releases. One way to scope out the API is to use the macro recording facility to manually do one slide, and then translate that to your target language.

I’ve got some old (not tested recently) python code for Powerpoint 2003 that should give you an idea of what the code might look like depending on your layout needs.

from win32com.client import Dispatch

ppLayoutTitle = 1
ppLayoutText  = 2

def writePresentation( fname, data ):
    pptApp = Dispatch('Powerpoint.Application')
    pres   = pptApp.ActivePresentation
    aw     = pptApp.ActiveWindow
    slides = pres.Slides

    for item in data:
        t1 = item[0]
        t2 = item[1]
        stype = item[2]
        assert(stype in [ppLayoutTitle,ppLayoutText])
        s = slides.Add( slides.Count, stype )
        aw.View.GotoSlide(s.SlideIndex)

        s.Shapes.Item(1).Select()
        aw.Selection.ShapeRange.TextFrame.TextRange.Select()
        aw.Selection.ShapeRange.TextFrame.TextRange.Characters(Start=1, Length=0).Select
        tr = aw.Selection.TextRange
        tr.Text = t1

        s.Shapes.Item(2).Select()
        aw.Selection.ShapeRange.TextFrame.TextRange.Select()
        if stype == ppLayoutText:
            aw.Selection.ShapeRange.TextFrame.TextRange.ParagraphFormat.Bullet.Visible = 0
        aw.Selection.ShapeRange.TextFrame.TextRange.Characters(Start=1, Length=0).Select
        tr = aw.Selection.TextRange
        tr.Text = t2
    slides.Range(slides.Count).Delete()
    pres.SaveAs(fname)

Edit:

Openoffice (that can export to powerpoint) also ships with it’s scripting API that could be used to solve similar problems.