Timing slides in PP/OLE Event Support

[ben]

I need to record timestamps when slides change in a presentation.
These are manually changed slides - not timed changes.

On Windows this has been accomplished by a VBA event listener along the
lines of:

Public WithEvents TimeStamps As PowerPoint.Application

Then we watch for SlideShowNextSlide events, and call a macro in the
presentation that writes the time to a file.
This has worked fine. But not on the Mac.

I've been digging through MSDN and the newsgroups about what is and
isn't supported in Mac PowerPoint 2004 - I'm sure the documentation
exists, but I haven't had much luck. Is this simply not supported on
Mac? Is there some other way to discover how long each slide was
viewed? I'm certainly not tied to VB.

cheers,
Ben

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I need to record timestamps when slides change in a presentation.
These are manually changed slides - not timed changes.

On Windows this has been accomplished by a VBA event listener along the
lines of:

Public WithEvents TimeStamps As PowerPoint.Application

Then we watch for SlideShowNextSlide events, and call a macro in the
presentation that writes the time to a file.
This has worked fine. But not on the Mac.

PPT Mac (all versions from 98 on) and PowerPoint 97 Windows are both VBA 5
rather than 6 and don't allow trapping events.

I've been digging through MSDN and the newsgroups about what is and
isn't supported in Mac PowerPoint 2004 - I'm sure the documentation
exists, but I haven't had much luck. Is this simply not supported on
Mac? Is there some other way to discover how long each slide was
viewed? I'm certainly not tied to VB.

An external app might be able to "watch" the presentation and periodically poll
to see what the current slide is.

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[ben]

Steve,

Interesting - you mean like screen capture, or are there some kind of
events that are being emitted to the OS?

Thank you for the info,

Ben

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Steve,

Interesting - you mean like screen capture, or are there some kind of
events that are being emitted to the OS?

Not screen capture. That'd be scary <g>.

But in Windows with PPT 97, you could, I think, write a VB (just as an example) app that polls
the OS for a PPT window; once it finds it, it could get a reference to the running copy of PPT,
and once it had that could navigate the OM to find out what slide PPT's on and keep polling it,
firing its own "Record Time" or other subs whenever the slide number changes.

In theory.

I think.

Thank you for the info,

Ben

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[ben]

Do you have any pointers to navigating the COM (or is OM something?) on
the Mac? I wouldn't mind writing an external app that tracks slides...

cheers,
ben

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Do you have any pointers to navigating the COM (or is OM something?) on
the Mac? I wouldn't mind writing an external app that tracks slides...

Paul? Oh Mr. Berkowitz? This sounds like your department. ;-)

I could help some with writing this for Windows using VB but haven't any experience automating PPT
from external apps on the Mac.

cheers,
ben

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

If you want Paul you have to say the magic word: applescript.

Applescript and probably RealBasic 2007 can use the OLE Automation model to
do stuff. In AppleScript you would use AppleScript syntax. In RealBasic you
would use VB Syntax to control PowerPoint externally.

In PowerPoint 2004 you can use VBA which is nearly identical to PPT97, but
VBA will not be possible in Office 2008.

-Jim Gordon
MacMVP

Paul? Oh Mr. Berkowitz? This sounds like your department. ;-)

I could help some with writing this for Windows using VB but haven't any
experience automating PPT
from external apps on the Mac.


================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

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