/PPspliT

A PowerPoint add-in that splits slides according to slideshow-time animation effects

Primary LanguageVBA

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                    |_|  by Massimo Rimondini

PPspliT is a PowerPoint add-in that transforms each slide of a presentation into a sequence of slides, each displaying the contents of the original slide as they would appear at every intermediate animation step. As such, its most natural context of application is to produce a redistributable version of a presentation in a flat file format like PDF.

To some extent, PowerPoint already provides export functions that are meant to include animations in the target file (e.g., it can export a presentation as a video). However, to my knowledge, a true conversion of existing slides into an equivalent sequence of static (i.e., animation-less) slides that is suitable for printing or PDF export has never been natively offered by PowerPoint. PPspliT tries to fill this gap.

Features

  • User experience
    • Fully integrated with PowerPoint: it is natively implemented in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
    • Adds a new tab in PowerPoint's native ribbon toolbar (or dedicated toolbar for PowerPoint releases prior to 2007): splitting slides is a one-click task.
    • Can operate on a range of selected slides or on the whole presentation, if no slides are selected.
  • Capabilities
    • Supports all entry, emphasis, exit and motion path effects applied to slide shapes (with some caveats, see below).
    • Supports "Rewind when done playing", "Hide on next mouse click" and "Auto-reverse" effect flags, as well as reversed motion paths.
    • Can split slides at every click-triggered animation effect (like it would happen during a slideshow) or at each and every animation effect (useful to preserve multiple intermediate animations that are played without any speaker interaction).
    • Updates custom slideshows by replacing each slide with those that result from splitting it. Custom slideshows are actually named sequences of slides from the full deck and, besides being used at presentation time, they can also be selected as predefined slide ranges when printing. Therefore, this feature can be exploited to conveniently export (by printing to PDF) slide subsequences that are predefined in the form of custom slideshows.
    • Can optionally preserve slide numbers during splitting: if slide footers contain text frames with dynamically computed slide numbers, these can be overwritten so that numbers in all the slides resulting from splitting a single original slide match its original slide number.
    • Operates with native PowerPoint shapes: the slides produced after the split are derived from the original presentation and still contain editable shapes.
    • Format-agnostic: since the final product is still a slide deck, you can export it to any document format for which you have a virtual printer or file converter installed. PDF is implicitly supported, as PowerPoint has been including an export function to this format for a few years now.

Some examples displaying the operation of the add-in can be found in the project home page.

Usage

Simply click on the "Split animations" button of the PPspliT toolbar. Using the appropriate checkboxes on the same toolbar, you can choose to split slides on animation effects that are triggered by a mouse click (most common usage) or just every animation effect (this may be especially slow). You can also choose to preserve slide numbers during the split.

Usage instructions are also available.

Notice: in all releases older than 2.0 the add-in makes heavy use of the system clipboard. Therefore, it is very important that you refrain from using it during the split and that no programs interfere with the clipboard at all. Effective since release 2.0, this requirement has been relaxed, and the system clipboard can be safely used while a slide deck is being split.

Warning: running the add-in will modify your presentation. Even though it is generally possible to revert the changes using the undo feature (Ctrl+Z), it is strongly advised to work on a copy of the original slide deck to avoid losing your work by accidentally overwriting it with the split presentation.

It may take a while for the split process to complete. If you are wondering

  1. why so much code and
  2. why does it take so long to split animations

here are some hints:

  • PowerPoint applies slideshow effects to rasterized versions of the shapes. Instead, in PPspliT the same effects are re-implemented on the original shape objects.
  • VBA has some sparse bugs here and there, which allow limited or no access to shape properties. I needed to work these around to my best.
  • Each animation step requires creating a new slide, which is time consuming.
  • For each animation step, all the shapes that are supposed to appear later on by means of a subsequent entry effect or to have disappeared because of a preceding exit effect must be appropriately removed.

Building

As PPspliT is implemented as a VBA macro inside PowerPoint, there is no true build procedure. The source code is embedded in PowerPoint binary files that are saved as native PowerPoint add-ins: this is also the reason why changes are tracked in separate files (e.g., PPspliT.bas).
The only step that requires building is the generation of distributable installers.

Prerequisites

Packaging for Windows

  • Edit the VBA macro inside PPT12+\PPspliT.pptm as needed, then prepare the file as follows:
    • Update the release number if required (also in the about dialog box).
    • Save the file (PPspliT.pptm).
    • Export each module from the Visual Basic for Applications editor into corresponding .bas, .frm and .frx files.
    • Export the whole file as a PowerPoint add-in (PPspliT.ppam).
    • Open PPspliT.pptm using the Office 2007 Custom UI Editor or the Office RibbonX Editor, update the release number if required, and save the file.
    • Do the same for PPspliT.ppam.
  • Apply consistent changes to file PPT11-\PPspliT.ppt, save it, export each module and export the whole PPT file as a PowerPoint 97-2003 add-in (PPspliT.ppa).
  • Edit file ppsplit_installer.nsi to refresh the release number if required.
  • Process file ppsplit_installer.nsi through NSIS (usually it is enough to right-click on the file and select "Compile NSIS script"). File PPspliT-setup.exe should then be generated in the parent folder.

Packaging for MacOS

  • Apply changes to PPspliT.pptm and export it as PowerPoint add-in PPspliT.ppam as described above for the Windows case.
  • Open file MacOS/PPspliT for MacOS/Install PPspliT.app using Apple's Script Editor.
  • Refresh resource PPspliT.ppam inside the script by dragging and dropping the updated PPspliT.ppam inside the Script Editor.
  • Save the installer and close the Script Editor.
  • Open a Terminal window and run script MacOS/PPspliT for MacOS/build_macos_dmg.sh to generate file PPspliT.dmg.

Known limitations

Yes, the list is apparently long, but please look carefully through it because it consists mostly of corner cases.

  • PPspliT does not offer any PDF conversion functions: it is not meant to. It just processes a presentation to split animations, then it is up to your favorite PDF generation software or PowerPoint's native PDF export function to generate the final PDF (or whatever other document format).
  • PPspliT does not preserve animation effects: the slide deck resulting from a split accurately renders the status of the slideshow at each intermediate animation step, but every slide is cleared of all animation effects. This means that you cannot have "moving shapes" in your final flat (PDF) document. Even if animations were preserved in the slides, embedding them in the final document would require advanced processing functions for every possible output document format, which is out of the scope of PPspliT, and would lead to much less portable documents.
  • All of the add-in features are implemented for all PowerPoint versions, but minor glitches may exist with versions prior to 2007, sometimes due to VBA limits or bugs.
  • Some functions are knowingly unsupported and may never be implemented:

  1. Slide transitions — Since they are meant to smoothen slide changes, they have no persistent effects on their contents, hence no action that needs to be rendered by PPspliT.

  2. Shape dimming after playing an effect

  3. Most effects/actions triggered by mouse clicks on a specific shape — As an exception, cross-slide hyperlinks are supported: their targets are updated to point to the originally meant slides even after they have been renumbered by the split. Slide previews using the zoom feature are not supported anyway, meaning that they may become broken after splitting.

  4. The shaking and blinking emphasis effects — This is due to a PowerPoint bug.

  5. Effects applied to individual shapes of composite objects (SmartArt, charts) — To my knowledge, the interface exposed by VBA to alter the properties of such shapes is somewhat limited. For example, a position property like Selection.ShapeRange(1).SmartArt.Nodes(1).Shapes(1).Left is read-only, and methods like ScaleHeight or Cut affect the whole SmartArt object despite being applied to its individual shapes. Shape groups are of course supported.

  6. For emphasis effects, repetition and "Until next click" duration — The duration parameter of emphasis effects normally indicates the time that it takes to play the effect until its end. For very few effect types, this same setting indicates the time for which the effect persists on its target shape instead. Effects that are not persistent (i.e., they have an established duration in seconds) are simply ignored by PPspliT. Any other emphasis effects are assumed to last until the end of the slide (or until a subsequent effect is applied to the same slide). This means that emphasis effects that last "until next click" are not supported and are handled in the same way as effects that last "until end of slide". On the other hand, the repeat setting allows to loop the effect's action for an established number of iterations or, alternatively, until the next mouse click or the end of the current slide. Since effect loops don't have any meaningful outcome on a statically rendered slide, PPspliT simply ignores this setting and assumes that all emphasis effects are applied once (i.e., without loops).

  7. Accurate rendering of color effects — PowerPoint implements color change effects in a way that is honestly hard for me to reverse engineer. PPspliT approximates these effects but the final applied color may not perfectly coincide with the one natively applied by PowerPoint.

  8. Many emphasis and motion effects that apply to a single text paragraph instead of a whole shape — In general, all those effects whose rendering requires separation of the text frame from its parent shape are unlikely to be supported.

  9. Rasterized shape scaling and non-proportional text resizing — PowerPoint applies any effects to rasterized versions of the shapes. As a consequence, grow/shrink effects affect all the elements of a shape (including, e.g., shape border thickness) and not necessarily preserve the aspect ratio. PPspliT resizes the native shape instead, thus preserving its components (including border thickness) and resulting in a sharper rendering, because the native vector shapes are preserved and there is no interpolation introduced by resizing or rotation effects. While this is generally welcome, the final result may sometimes differ from the intended one. Most evidently, PPspliT only supports proportional growing/shrinking of text elements: if a grow/shrink effect occurs on a text element and is set to only affect it vertically or horizontally, PPspliT renders it by adjusting the font size by an amount that is a good compromise between horizontal and vertical growth/shrink, but no "compression" or "expansion" of the text occurs.

  10. Accurate rendering of some rotation effects — When a slide show is played, PowerPoint rotates shapes around the center of the visible shape body. Instead, PPspliT rotates them around the center of the container box. Sometimes the container box may be larger than the visible shape, resulting in a different center of rotation being applied. To explain the difference, consider an arc, whose container box is the rectangle (or, possibly, square) that encloses the full circle: at slideshow time PowerPoint can rotate the arc around the center of the arc stroke itself, whereas PPspliT would rotate it around the center of the container box: since the latter is generally (much) larger than the visible arc, the final impression is that the visible shape (the arc) has "wandered around".

  11. Exit/entry effects applied to shapes that are part of a slide layout are only partially supported — In fact, these shapes are turned into placeholders (instead of disappearing altogether) when one attempts to delete them. While this is not an issue in the vast majority of cases, if such placeholders have a formatting applied (e.g., a background color) they may stay visible even when they are not expected to.

  12. Adjustment of slide numbers on a PPTX file that is imported into PowerPoint <=2003 using the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack — This is a very old special condition and is never expected to occur.

  13. Adjustment of (dynamic) slide numbers that appear in standard text boxes — Although dynamically updated slide numbers can be inserted in any text paragraph, PPspliT is only able to adjust them (i.e., preserve a numbering that is coherent with the one of the original slides even after splitting) if such numbers appear in special placeholder boxes defined in slide masters and inserted as headers/footers in the slide deck.

  14. Animations in slide masters

  15. Animation effects whose order is strictly dependent on timing — Animation effects can be played after a mouse click ("on click"), after the preceding effect has ended ("after previous") or at the same time as a preceding effect ("with previous"). While ordering of the effect outcomes is strictly defined in the first two cases, it may depend on timing in the third case. For example, if effect B follows effect A in the animation sequence, both effects are set to play "with previous" but effect A has a delay set to 1 second whereas effect B has no delay, effect B is played before effect A. PPspliT does not consider this kind of reordering, and assumes that effects are always played in the same order in which they appear in the animation sequence.

  16. Something else I am not aware of

Manual Installation

PPspliT comes packaged with an installer which eases setup by means of a convenient wizard. The installer is tuned to operate in many different typical configurations (as a sole exception, security features in recent releases of macOS may require following specific (un)installation instructions). However, in the unlikely case in which it fails, you can still attempt a manual installation by following the procedure below.

  1. Download the latest PPspliT macro file and save it to a location of your choice. As an alternative, download the latest Windows installer file (even if you are using macOS), open it with your favorite Zip unpacker (do not start the installer), find file PPspliT.ppam inside the archive and save it to a location of your choice.

  2. Start PowerPoint.

  3. Add the downloaded PPspliT.ppam as a PowerPoint add in as described at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-or-load-a-powerpoint-add-in-3de8bbc2-2481-457a-8841-7334cd5b455f, namely:

  • In case you are using PowerPoint for Windows:
  1. Click the File tab, then Options.
  2. In the Options dialog box, click Add-Ins.
  3. In the Manage list at the bottom of the dialog box, click PowerPoint Add-ins, then click Go.
  4. In the Add-Ins dialog box, click Add New.
  5. In the Add New PowerPoint Add-In dialog box, browse for the previously saved PPspliT.ppam file and then click OK.
  6. A security notice might appear. In this case, click on Enable Macros and then click Close.
  • If, instead, you are using PowerPoint for macOS:
  1. Open the Tools menu on the top bar (i.e. not the PowerPoint ribbon toolbar, but rather the macOS menu bar at the top of the screen) and select PowerPoint add ins.
  2. Click on + and select file PPspliT.ppam that you saved above.

Note that,even when this issue occurs, the installer should have already taken care of copying the required files to a proper location in your system (usually %APPDATA%\Microsoft\AddIns\PPspliT for Windows systems, and $HOME/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office for macOS systems). Therefore, the steps for unpacking and saving file PPspliT.ppam described above can be skipped.

References

Acknowledgments

Although I am the only developer of the add-in, several suggestions for improvements and bug fixes came in the form of feedback from its end users. Some of them are acknowledged in the changelog.

Troubleshooting

The add-in is splitting only the first slide instead of the whole slide deck.

Maybe you have accidentally selected the first slide in the left-side thumbnail pane of PowerPoint. Just try clicking anywhere in the main pane of PowerPoint (i.e., the slide editor) and try PPspliTting again.

The (Windows) installer fails to recognize any PowerPoint releases (error message "the add in has been left unconfigured").

This may happen, for example, when a pre installed OEM PowerPoint release is being used. There is not much that can be done to address this issue, as specially packed PowerPoint releases may be harder to detect for the installer and the effort to improve its recognition capabilities exceeds the user reported impact of this problem. However, you can still work around this little problem by performing a manual installation.

Error "Macro cannot be found or has been disabled because of security" is displayed every time a split is attempted.

As an outdated but, possibly, still valid explanation, a security update released by Microsoft around April 2012 may cause this issue with most VBA-based applications that make use of dialog boxes, including PPspliT. To correct this problem, Microsoft suggests deleting cached versions of control type libraries, which is harmless for your system. I can confirm that this solution has worked for me. Basically, you have to delete all .exd files stored in %HOMEPATH%\Application Data\Microsoft\Forms and %TEMP%\VBE. Please rely on the official instructions from Microsoft, which can be found in the page mentioned above.
If this does not solve your problem, then either you are still using a really outdated PPspliT release (1.5 was known to have such compatibility problems) or your macro security settings may need to be reviewed.