Powerpoint 2007 - inserting pictures into template

[Burris]

Hi all,

I am brand new to this website. My friend suggested that I look into Autoit for a possible solution. As I know next to nothing about this wonderful little program (but I am learning now) I thought I would register onto the help forum and ask questions instead of trying to re-invent the wheel. I hope someone has either tried what I need to do or can just simply tell me that it cannot be done (ha!) and I will have to go back to the old fashioned repetitive mouse clicking!

Okay, here is my situation. I have a PowerPoint 2007 template with currently 90 slides and growing. The first slide tells everyone to take 30 pictures and edit them in whatever personal favorite photoeditor they have and then same a copy of them into a working folder on their desktop. The suggestion is to relabel each picture to the corresponding title so they are easier to find and insert. Now the PowerPoint slides have both data and at least 1-3 picture(s) on each slide (in full page, half page, third page and 1/6 page picture formats). Since each student must take 30 pictures from their personal databases and insert them into the PowerPoint template in specific locations (yes, using the same pictures over and over in this template) - can an Autoit be created to help assist this very repetitive and time consuming process?

Here are the control factors: If each student uses Windows XP, Powerpoint 2007 and has a folder on their desktop with a working copy of their 30 pictures labeled (for example, Pic-01 thru Pic-30), could Autoit automatically find and replace each location that requires a picture that has a matching word Pic-01 thru Pic-30 at each picture insert location within PowerPoint 2007?

Maybe I also have to ask a PowerPoint 2007 forum if I can anchor a word at each formatted picture location on each slide (with a word anchor like Pic-01 thru Pic-30) so that the Find and Replace function can work with a program like AutoIt?

If it can be done, I would like to burn the template and Autoit onto a cdrom and distribute it to all of the remaining members of a particular study group so that everyone can shave off at least 3+ hours worth of work (as I sat and assisted one member last night). The majority of members of this particular study group are very smart but not very computer smart so I am trying to figure out a way so that they do not have to spend so much time doing the mundane.

Thank you for your time on this topic.

Thomas.

[PsaltyDS]

Microsoft adds Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to the Office suite for scripting the apps. PowerPoint has a VBA interface, as do Word and Excel. This VBA interface also provides AutoIt a COM interface it can use, hence the UDFs for AutoIt for Excel and Word. This means almost anything you can write in VBA can be translated to AutoIt.

The PowerPoint interface has been wrapped into an AutoIt UDF by Toady: PowerPoint.au3

Since it is not included in the official AutoIt distribution yet, you won't find those functions in the help file.

And welcome to AutoIt.

Edit: Bad grammar.

Edited January 31, 2009 by PsaltyDS