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

'Note that this RightAnswer does not au 
tomatically go to the next
'slide.
Sub RightAnswer
ActivePresentation.SlideShowWindow.View.Slide.Shapes(4) _
.TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Good job, " & userName
ActivePresentation.SlideShowWindow.View.Slide.Shapes(4).Vis 
i 
ble = True
End Sub
You have seen most of this be 
fore.
GetStarted
,
Ini 
tial 
ize
, and
YourName
are just like what we used earlier. The only new thing is in
RightAnswer
. Rather than us ing a sim ple string, like “Hello,” for the text in the 
78 A Scripting Bag of Tricks

---

object, we put to gether some text with the user’s name, just like we did with a
MsgBox
in our earlier
DoingWell
pro ce dures.
Of course, you can do the same thing with a shape that you use VBA to cre-
ate, but you can fig ure that out for yourself.
Ma nip u lat ing Text in Ob jects
In the previous section, we changed the text in a shape by accessing the
shape’s
.TextFrame.TextRange.Text
. Now that you have access to that
part of a shape, you can do whatever you want to the text in that shape. This is
useful for chang ing the text in shapes you draw with the drawing tools, in shapes
you cre ate with VBA with 
AddShape
, and in shapes that come with PowerPoint
slides (such as the title or bulleted text area on a slide). But you can do more than
simply change the text on a shape to something new. You can ma nipulate the
text in many different ways. This section doesn’t cover all of them, but it is
enough to get you started exploring.
With
Blocks
Before changing the text, we should learn a simple VBA trick to save you
from typ ing long ex pressions over and over again. You might have no ticed that
to get to the text for a shape, you have to type something very long, such as