How to unlock groupes generated by Photo Album

[Mehrdad Mirreza]

Photo Album wizard is a great tool to insert a lot of pictures in a
presentation, each on a seperate slide. This automates a lot of work. You can
also give captions to this pictures, by clicking the option "Caption below
ALL pictures". This is nice too, but using this option, the picture and its
caption are packed together in a group. You can move and resize the group,
but not ungroup it, because it is locked!! Even trying to ungroup
programmatically leads to following error:

Run-time error -2147024891 (80070005)
Group is locked and cannot be ungrouped.

My question is, if anyone knows how I can unlock this group? I actually
don't know any method which lockes or unlocks a shape, but obvoiusly such a
thing exists and is maybe reserved only for Microsoft, because the picture
sizing handles are changed to something like screws! So it's a hidden feature!

The even worse thing is, that you cannot do anything with the picture, but
deleting it, when you remove the caption textbox from the group!

 

[Luc]

Mehrdad,
I do not know of any means to ungroup the picture and its caption. In PPT
2007 it is possible though to remove the caption from the group without
deleting the picture.
That said, maybe someone with VBA knowledge will be able to help you.
Luc Sanders
MVP - PowerPoint

 

[Glen Millar]

Hi,

Cut the object, paste special back as wmf or emf (vector) and then ungroup
twice. You will then have a transparent frame to remove off the top. That's
the non-VBA way, although you could code your files to do that on each
slide.

--
Regards,
Glen Millar
Microsoft PPT MVP

Tutorials and PowerPoint animations at
the original www.pptworkbench.com
glen at pptworkbench dot com

 

[Mehrdad Mirreza]

Thanks Glen. This trick worked fine with a small side effect, that the
resolution of the gif-picture inside the group is reduced after paste as emf
and wmf, but it's still OK
(http://wikisend.com/download/558902/Photo Album.pptx). Here is the code
for it, if someone needs it some time:


Sub un_lock()
With ActiveWindow
.Selection.ShapeRange.Cut
.View.PasteSpecial ppPasteEnhancedMetafile
.Selection.ShapeRange.Ungroup
End With
End Sub


Detecting the empty shapes and removing them would be complicated to be done
progrtammatically (if possible at all), so I recommend to do it manually.

The interesting point still open, is why Microsoft has the control over the
locked property and we don't! I'm still curious about which object memeber
(method or property) controls this. It would be very helpful sometimes to be
able to lock a picture or shape.

Regards
Mehrdad Mirreza

Hi,

Cut the object, paste special back as wmf or emf (vector) and then ungroup
twice. You will then have a transparent frame to remove off the top. That's
the non-VBA way, although you could code your files to do that on each
slide.

--
Regards,
Glen Millar
Microsoft PPT MVP

Tutorials and PowerPoint animations at
the original www.pptworkbench.com
glen at pptworkbench dot com
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Photo Album wizard is a great tool to insert a lot of pictures in a
presentation, each on a seperate slide. This automates a lot of work. You [...]