Question

I am making my first Powerpoint 2007 macro and I am having a bit of trouble with it hanging, and not letting me move on to the next slide. I can press ESCAPE to quit the slideshow, but pressing space bar or anything else won’t progress to the next slide. After a while, it just crashes. I come from a C++/Java background so I think its just something basic that I’m missing.

Basically I am trying to do a counter slide that counts the days/minutes/seconds from a particular date. When the slide loads I want it to show, in real time, how long its been since that date. I’ve put it through an infinite loop, which works fine to update the time, but then doesnt let me move on to the next slide.

Here’s my code:

    Sub OnSlideShowPageChange(ByVal SSW As SlideShowWindow)
    'If SSW.View.CurrentShowPosition = 3 Then
    Do While SSW.View.CurrentShowPosition = 3    ' infinite loop
        Dim currentSlide As Integer
        currentSlide = SSW.View.CurrentShowPosition

        Dim startDate As Date
        Dim currentDate As Date
        Dim sngDiff As Single
        Dim lngDays As Long
        Dim lngHours As Long
        Dim lngMinutes As Long
        Dim lngSeconds As Long

        startDate = #7/22/2011 2:00:00 PM#
        currentDate = Now

        sngDiff = currentDate - startDate
        lngDays = CLng(sngDiff)
        sngDiff = sngDiff - lngDays
        lngHours = Hour(sngDiff)
        lngMinutes = Minute(sngDiff)
        lngSeconds = Second(sngDiff)

        With ActivePresentation.Slides(currentSlide)
            With .Shapes(2)
            .TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "It has been:" & lngDays & " Days " & lngHours & " hours " & lngMinutes & " minutes " & lngSeconds & " Seconds"
            End With
        End With

    DoEvents
    Loop
End Sub

Do I need to listen for some sort of button click to stop this infinite loop, or how do I do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

A user form is something you add in the VBA editor; it’s what you’d normally think of as a dialog box, though forms can be used for other things and needn’t even become visible; that’s what we’re going to do here:

Option Explicit
Public bFormCodeRunning As Boolean

Sub FormDemo()

' Set a flag to let us know the code in the form
' is running
bFormCodeRunning = True

' "show" the form
UserForm1.Show vbModeless


End Sub

Sub KillForm()
' call this at some other point in the presentation
' when you're sure you're done running the form code

If Not bFormCodeRunning Then
    Unload UserForm1
End If

' You could actually call this from your slide change event handler

End Sub

Then Insert, User Form from the menu to add a new form; doubleclick it to view its code and add this:

Private Sub UserForm_Activate()

    ' Don't show my face
    Me.hide
    DoEvents

    ' prove that the form's loaded
    MsgBox "I'm well-formed"

    DoEvents
    ' and put your other code here

    ' and when the code's done, flag it
    bFormCodeRunning = False

End Sub