random slides

[Noel and Cathy Bailey]

How do I use Virtual Basic and macros and action buttons to randomise the
order of slides in a PowerPoint presentation?

I'm in education and randomising slides is fairly crucial to me. I've
searched the net and found Virtual Basic routines (presumably for Windows)
but I can't get them to work in PowerPoint 2004.

Any one got any ideas?


Noel Bailey

 

[David M. Marcovitz]

Noel,

There are several ways to do this. The easiest way is to use Tushar
Mehta's add-in. I've never tried it on a Mac, but I would be surprised if
it didn't work on a Mac. You can find that at:

http://www.tushar-mehta.com/powerpoint/randomslideshow/

Another alternative is to use one of the examples from my site:

http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/

Examples 8-15, 8-16, and 8-17 (click on "Examples by Chapter" and
"Chapter 8") all do different things with randomization. 8-15 displays
random addition problems, but does not randomize the slides. 8-16
icnludes a procedure named RandomNext, which randomly picks which slide
to go to next. This example is set up to randomly pick 5 slides from all
the slides, except the first and the last. After the 5 slides, it jumps
to the last slide.

If Tushar's add-in doesn't do what you want, let me know if you need me
to help you modify one of my examples to suit your purposes. It would be
easy, for example, to change the number of slides chosen to something
more than 5.

--David

--
David M. Marcovitz
Director of Graduate Programs in Educational Technology
Loyola College in Maryland
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/