Question

I have been trying to work out the best way for a power point to be shown on a Intranet. The users in the company will not be very technical and might not follow the processes I will describe.

I found this page

Which shows how to convert a power point in to a html page which can be viewed. I was wanting to know if there is some way to automate this process. Such as a file watcher watching the location it will saved and then as soon as it is seen automatically changes this to a html using the code provided on the page I gave. Preferred language to use would be VB.NET.

I am happy for any suggestions that people can give.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I’ve used the:

Imports PowerPoint = Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint

to be able to automatically change a power point in to a HTML. I’ve used a file watcher to watch a directory on my computer to look out for power point presentations at the moment it is only set to .pptx however I’ll change this to add other formats soon. This fileWater is sat on a service that starts up when the computer does. It then looks to see if a powerpoint has been created or modified and runs this code:

Private Shared Sub OnChanged(ByVal source As Object, ByVal e As FileSystemEventArgs)
    'set varaibles so that html can save in correct place
    Dim destinationDirectory As String = e.FullPath.Replace(e.Name.ToString(), "")
    Dim sourceLocation As String
    Dim fileName As String
    'couple of if statements to get rid of unwanted characters
    If e.Name.Contains("~$") Then
        fileName = e.Name.Replace("~$", "")
        fileName = fileName.Replace(".pptx", ".html")
    Else
        fileName = e.Name
        fileName = fileName.Replace(".pptx", ".html")
    End If

    If e.FullPath.Contains(("~$")) Then
        sourceLocation = e.FullPath.Replace("~$", "")
    Else
        sourceLocation = e.FullPath
    End If

    Dim strSourceFile As String = sourceLocation 'set source location after removing unwanted characters
    Dim strDestinationFile As String = destinationDirectory & fileName 'set the destination location with the directory and file name
    'set ppAPP to a power point application
    Dim ppApp As PowerPoint.Application = New PowerPoint.Application
    Dim prsPres As PowerPoint.Presentation = ppApp.Presentations.Open(strSourceFile, MsoTriState.msoTrue, MsoTriState.msoFalse, MsoTriState.msoFalse)
    'Call the SaveAs method of Presentaion object and specify the format as HTML
    prsPres.SaveAs(strDestinationFile, PowerPoint.PpSaveAsFileType.ppSaveAsHTML, MsoTriState.msoTrue)
    'Close the Presentation object
    prsPres.Close()
    'Close the Application object
    ppApp.Quit()

End Sub

This gets the file which has been modified and saves it as a html document. It will also get the files needed to run so if any animations have been saved it will also keep those.