PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

VSTO 3.0 for Office 2007 Programming: Conversation with Vivek Thangaswamy

Vivek Thangaswamy is a Software Solution developer and technical author based in Chennai, India. He specializes in Microsoft enterprise application architectures and server-based product integrations. Vivek is a Microsoft MVP, and he completed his Bachelor of Technology degree in Information Technology and is currently pursuing an MBA in Finance. In this conversation, Vivek discusses his newly released book: VSTO 3.0 for Office 2007 Programming.

Geetesh: Tell us more about your VSTO for Office 2007 book, and what is the profile of your typical reader?

Vivek: Although there are numerous web resources available for VSTO, there are very few books available on this subject. I find it is always nice to refer to a book as and when required. When choosing a book for any new technology, readers always look for one that teaches from the ground level. In my VSTO 3.0 for Office 2007 Programming book, I start from the basics and make readers competent enough to take control over the VSTO programming. This book addresses all segments of the audience, including beginners, intermediate users, and VBA programmers — it is also a good resource for VBA programmers who want to learn VSTO. I make them comfortable with C# programming in VSTO, which info is not available in any other resource that I am aware of. The entire book was written in a style that calls for short and crisp content to make learning easier and faster. Full examples are provided using the latest Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, and the code snippets are done using C#.

You will learn about VSTO, how VSTO compares to VBA, and the features and limitations of the current version of VSTO, including its architecture. Each individual Office application is handled precisely in separate chapters of the book, including InfoPath and Excel. The book covers new ground by exploring VSTO programming for PowerPoint, Visio, and Project, again that’s something I haven’t found covered elsewhere. You learn new concepts like Ribbon programming, application-level solutions, and document-level solutions for Microsoft Office 2007. Object models for each Office application are covered.

As part of a team with Packt Publications, I aimed to create a quality book for budding developers.

Geetesh: Tell us about your experiences working with the object model in PowerPoint 2007 and controlling it with VSTO.

Vivek: Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the finest presentation tools available. However, I was not a frequent PowerPoint user, so I brainstormed with some frequent PowerPoint users about the essential operations that all PowerPoint users perform frequently and used those observations for programming examples using VSTO for PowerPoint in my book.

First, I cover all the basic programmability of PowerPoint using VSTO and then explain the object model for PowerPoint. There is a huge collection of objects available to be explored by the PowerPoint programmer. While I don’t cover it all, I have worked with the basics in the book so that the budding programmer has a strong foundation to start with PowerPoint programming using VSTO. Currently, I don’t see as many PowerPoint programmers in the community as for other Office applications. I hope that my book will raise the PowerPoint programming interest in the community.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Interviews, PowerPoint 2007, Programming, VSTO

Grouping Slide Objects in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

This tutorial shows you how you can group slide objects in PowerPoint 2007 and higher with regular Ribbon tab controls, right-click options, and shortcut keys. When you have many (or more than one) slide objects on a slide that you want to manipulate in the same way, you might want to consider grouping them. Grouping can be helpful in many scenarios.

Learn how to group objects on a slide in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Positioning, PowerPoint 2007, Tutorials

Freepath 2.0: The Indezine Review

We all live in a world where media assaults at every angle, be it in the form of television and online video, or even in the form of digicam pictures and music tracks. And of course, this can be extended to something much more huge by the plethora of file formats inhabiting everybody’s computer hard disks in the form of ubiquitous PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel sheets, Adobe PDFs, Flash movies, and more.

So how does one create logical collections of such photos, document files, music tracks, and video files in one place, and will this collection be easy to maintain and share? That’s a challenge we all face each day. Take an iPod for example. It comes with iTunes, which allows you to make some sense of your huge music collection by creating manual and intelligent playlists so that they can be played in an organized, arranged, and pre-sequenced manner. Freepath, the product which we are reviewing, tackles many of these challenges by extending the playlist metaphor to all your document and media formats, including all the formats discussed in the preceding paragraph. In addition, it also tackles QuickTime movies, YouTube videos, and live websites.

Read the Indezine review of Freepath 2.0.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Freepath, Playlists, PowerPoint, Review

Grouping Slide Objects in PowerPoint 2003 and 2002 for Windows

When you have many (or more than one) slide objects on a slide that you want to manipulate in the same way, you might want to consider grouping them. Grouping can be helpful in several scenarios: You want to animate several slide objects at the same time as a single object, or you have too many objects on the slide, and want them all grouped so that you don’t have to select them individually all the time, or maybe you just like to have all objects on your slide organized.

Learn how to group objects on a slide in PowerPoint 2003 and 2002 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2003
Tagged as: Positioning, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2002, PowerPoint 2003, Shapes, Tutorials

PowerPoint FAQ: Conversation with Steve Rindsberg

   Steve Rindsberg is the founder and President of RDP, based in Cincinnati, OH (USA). Steve’s been associated with PowerPoint since the product originated — his PowerPoint FAQ site is a treasure trove of PowerPoint information. When he’s not updating his site, he’s creating new add-ins that expand possibilities. Steve’s also into a lot of print technology-related stuff.

Geetesh: How did the PowerPoint FAQ (PPT FAQ) evolve?

Steve: Back before the Internet and the Web became mainstream, Microsoft had several support forums on Compuserve. I used to hang out on the PowerPoint forum and answer questions. In part, it was a great way to learn more about the software and to get ideas for a monthly column I used to write for Inside PowerPoint magazine, but mostly it was fun to be able to help other PowerPoint users.

Of course, newcomers always tended to have the same basic questions. Rather than type the same answers over and over again, I started to keep a couple of text files with “stock answers” that I could copy and paste as responses. That may seem a little impersonal, but really, it works out better for everyone. Instead of dashing off a quick answer (and maybe leaving out important bits by mistake), I could take the time to write a nice, clear, complete answer once, and many people could benefit from it. And that left more time to work on the tricky, less-frequently asked questions.

Then along came the web. Publishing all of these stock answers on my website seemed like the obvious thing to do. That way, people didn’t have to wait for me to reply to their questions on the forums; they could just check the site for a quick answer.

Geetesh: How do you keep all this content updated?

Steve: For a while, I wrote the content and created the links in Word, then exported to HTML for the web. That worked fairly well when there were only a few dozen questions and answers, but the FAQ very quickly grew unmanageable in Word.

You know what they say: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Well, the not-so-tough, if they’re nerds, write software.

I wrote my own program to create and update the questions and answers, create the HTML, and publish it to the web. And of course, I added features that make it easy for me to find an answer quickly and paste a link to it directly into the forum and later newsgroup replies.

This all evolved into a program called Friday (for obscure reasons having to do with a 1950’s TV detective show), that I use to maintain the PowerPoint FAQ, the various PPTools sites, and several other sites.

Interestingly, a lot of the work that went into Friday became the basis for our PPT2HTML add-in for PowerPoint, but that’s another story for another day, I think.

Geetesh: Does the PowerPoint community help you?

Steve: Oh, absolutely! Somebody has to ask questions frequently in order for them to become frequently asked questions.

Without the PowerPoint community, the PowerPoint FAQ (at least my version of it) wouldn’t exist. Between the users’ questions and the contributions of the PowerPoint MVPs and other newsgroup regulars, there’s no end of material for the FAQ. Even with Friday’s help, I have trouble keeping up.

The PowerPoint FAQ really is a community effort. You might say that I’m more the librarian than the author. That’s why this is one of the first things you see when you go there:

“Thanks to everyone on the newsgroups for asking such interesting and challenging questions, and a very special thanks to the PowerPoint MVPs and the OughtaBeMVPs who’ve contributed so much to this site and to the larger PowerPoint community.”

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint, PPTools, Steve Rindsberg