Access slide show

[Maarkr]

I've been tasked to revise an existing slide show that uses Access and
Powerpoint. This show is displayed weekly to a large audience and covers many
different items. Over the years, the presentation has been played with so
much that it looks bad. Access is used because it imports or links several
dbs & ss's, and leads into PP to view simpler slide show elements for ease
of use. A form was built for each Access 'slide' that you clicked on (about
20 in all); fwd/prev buttons in the corner to access the next form using
open/close macros. I've been scratching my head about the best way to revise
this... short term is to reformat the forms so they look alike and restore
some overall functionality, and longer term is to automate the data to output
to an internet platform, probably using HTML or the like. Just poking around
for ideas (if there's any). Questions: Should I stick with cmdbtns to go
from form to form by open/close methods, or maybe list the forms in a table
(so the owner can move form names to different rows -and increment a sequence
number for selections), or use keys for sequencing? Any other ideas for this
'slide show' concept? I noticed DAP was going away for Office 2007, which we
will upgrade to next year, so I don't want to develop pages. Thanks ...

 

[Pat Hartman]

You can create a table with a list of the slide forms and a sequence number.
The sequence number will be used to control the standard order of the
slides. You can use a listbox on a form to display the list of slides.
Clicking on a slide name can open the correct form. This way, you don't
have to worry about form-to-form control. The user can click in order or
jump around.

 

[FredFred]

One more idea. Make a single form and each slide a record. Make boxes on
the form for text or images, each corresponding to a field.

For better or worse this will standardize the layout. And then changes are
just changes in data rather than modifying the various individual forms.

 

[Dale Fye]

Another option you might want to consider is to use PowerPoint as your
presentation software, and use a combination of Access and Excel to generate
the information for the PPT slides. Powerpoint has a much richer
presentation than Access, Excel makes much "prettier" graphs than either of
the others.

Did this awhile back, so I don't remember the specifics. In Access create
the queries you need to generate your presentation information (graphs,
tables, ...). Then use Excels data query capability to pull this information
from access into individual spreadsheets. Then create the graphs based on
this information. You can setup Excel so that it will refresh all of these
data links every time you run it.

Then copy your graphs and past them into Powerpoint (cannot remember the
exact option, I think it has something to do with OLE imbedding). As I
recall, all I had to do was Excel and refresh the queries to the Access
database, then open Powerpoint and all my slides were updated.

HTH
Dale

 

[Maarkr]

appreciate the help... for now, I went with separate forms which are listed
in a table so I can change the order if needed later and code a button in the
corner to advance the slides; even tho a slide background master is useful,
the data was displayed differently so I couldn't have too much on the
master... the Access-Excel-PPt was not a bad idea, but I've been trying
different ways to automate many different sources into one and did not want
to cope with the many update errors that tend to occur... I still have to tie
in a PPt show after the Access slides anyway cause some peeps just
won't/can't do anything but type into a text box on a slide... this will work
for a few months until I move everything to a web format where hopefully
everything will import/export OK and a common display will be good.