Certificate maker
Here's a request that we hear frequently:
"I want people who view my presentation to somehow fill in their name and other information, then I want the information they fill in to be used elsewhere in the presentation, perhaps on a certificate. Oh, and if they could then print the certificate, that'd be nice too."
If a VBA-based solution will work for you, AutoCertificate.ppt might be the answer.
As downloaded, it's a simple two-slide presentation. On the first slide, you'll find instructions for using it and on the second slide, you'll find a sample "certificate" and a "Print Me" button.
You can modify the presentation in pretty much any way you like or just copy the VBA code into your own presentation.
The main thing to understand is that the text control boxes where the user will enter text must be named in a particular way, and the "placeholders" where the text will eventually appear elsewhere in your presentation must also follow a similar naming convention.
In case it gets a bit slow
The record and proceed macro does a search and replace over every bit of text in every slide of your presentation looking for replaceable %text%. If you have lots of slides or lots of text on your slides (or both!) that can take some time.
We've added a way of speeding things up but it'll take a little extra preparation on your part.
First, open your presentation then press F11 to open the VBA editor. Open the macros for this project (don't forget, you may need to enter a password). Put the cursor in the macro named:
Sub MarkPresentationAsSearchOnlyMarked()
Press F5 to run it.
This sets things up so that the proceed and record macro will ignore all slides EXCEPT those you've marked in the next step.
Select the slide or slides you want the search to work on (those with %text% that needs to be replaced) then run this macro:
Sub MarkSlideForSearch()
That tells the record and proceed macro to search these slides.
If you change your mind, you can run
Sub UNMarkSlideForSearch()
to unmark any selected slide or slides so that they won't be searched.
Or
Sub UNMarkPresentationAsSearchOnlyMarked()
to reset the presentation to normal ... that is, so that ALL slides are searched.
Having troubles?
If you have trouble getting this to work, give me a shout in the PowerPoint Newsgroup. I check messages there several times a day. Sorry, but I can't do phone or email support for this.
If you're looking for an industrial-strength way to merge lots of data from a spreadsheet or other source into PowerPoint slides or presentations, have a look at our PPTools Merge add-in for PowerPoint.
VBA isn't practical in some cases. See Will VBA solve my presentation problem? if you're unsure whether a VBA solution will work for you.
See How do I use VBA code in PowerPoint? to learn more about using/editing VBA code.