Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

What Is Vi sual Ba sic for Ap plications?
Visual Ba sic for Ap plications (VBA) is a very powerful ob ject-oriented
programming language that can be used to add to the functionality of Microsoft
Office ap plications, in cluding Microsoft PowerPoint. You might have got ten
stuck on the phrase “powerful ob ject-oriented pro gramming language.” Don’t
let that bother you. Your car is a pow erful electrical, mechanical, and thermody-
namic transportation de vice, but you can still drive (or if you are too young to
drive, your par ents can drive, so how hard can it be?). Later in this chapter,
you’ll learn what it means to be a “powerful ob ject-oriented pro gramming lan-
guage,” but remember the premise of this book: You are learning to be a scripter,
not a pro grammer. Just like you don’t need to un derstand the thermodynamics of 
the combustion en gine to drive your car, you can become a scripter without a
degree in computer science.
Originally, PowerPoint was a presentation tool, used by many to enhance
lectures, sometimes making them better and sometimes making them worse.
PowerPoint served as an au tomated overhead projector. Slides could be changed
with the click of a but ton. Pictures and sounds could be added. Text could fly
onto the screen as points were in troduced, sav ing the need for a piece of paper to
cover half the pro jector (and an noy half the audience).
Enter PowerPoint 97. Starting with that version, PowerPoint was trans-
formed from a pre sentation tool to an in teractive tool. While it still can be used
as a pre sentation tool, it be comes more pow erful as an in teractive tool. As you
saw in Chapter 2, in ad dition to multimedia elements (pictures, sounds, vid eos),
newer ver sions of PowerPoint al low in ter ac tive el e ments, in clud ing buttons and
hyperlinks. You can
• add but tons to control navigation (start your slide show with a menu,
for ex ample, rather than requiring lin ear nav igation, from slide to
slide to slide);
• jump to other slide shows, files, or Web pages; and
• cre ate ru di men tary mul ti ple-choice tests (click ing on a but ton with
the correct an swer takes the student to a slide that says “correct,” for
example).
While PowerPoint’s interactivity is very powerful and useful, it is also very
limited. VBA ex tends this to nearly un limited dimensions. With VBA, you can
change the content and ap pearance of slides based on student in put, you can ask
for and process typed in put, you can add ad ditional slides, you can hide and
show graphics, and much more. You will learn the basics of scripting in VBA
beginning in Chapter 4. First, we’ll pause to learn a little bit about what ob -
ject-oriented programming is.
34 In tro duc ing Vi sual Ba sic for Ap pli ca tions

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Note that the VBA features of PowerPoint work in all ver -
sions of PowerPoint starting with ver sion 97, but they do
not work in the PowerPoint Viewer or when saved as a
Web page. PowerPoint pre sentations that use VBA can be
placed on the Web, but they must be downloaded from the
Web and run di rectly on a machine with a full version of
PowerPoint.