Filed under: Features, How-tos
Mac Automation: automating Microsoft PowerPoint 2008
Welcome to the 3rd Microsoft Office 2008 automation post. Previously we covered automating Excel 2008 and Word 2008, now we shine the spotlight on PowerPoint 2008. In this how-to, I will show you how to create an Automator workflow to automate the daunting task of applying animations to the slides and converting a presentation into a QuickTime movie file. For this workflow, you'll need the following Automator actions (in the same order):
- Apply Animation to PowerPoint Slide Parts
- Convert PowerPoint Presentations to Movies
- Play Movies
Setting up the workflow
First off you must create a new PowerPoint slide show. Create your slides as you normally would. When you get the Automator actions in place, you'll need to need to tweak the "Apply Animation to PowerPoint Slide Parts" action to your liking. You can choose which slide part to animate and the effect it will use.
Be sure to choose a Save as name in the "Convert PowerPoint Presentations to Movies" action. You can also change how your movie will play once it is done in the "Play Movies" action.
Running the workflow
To run the workflow, just open your PowerPoint slide show that you created earlier and click the run button in the top-right corner of Automator. The currently opened PowerPoint slide show will have the animation you specified applied to it and will then be converted to a QuickTime .mov file. After the video is converted, QuickTime will open and play the movie as you specified in the "Play Movies" action.
Saving the workflow
You can now save the Automator workflow to your liking.
Applications of this workflow
You can tweak this workflow and use your Mac as a kiosk-type display.
Remember, if you would like to know how to automate something in Mac OS X be sure to leave a comment.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ron said 12:26PM on 3-26-2008
Is it possible to have a script completely automate the creation of a slideshow from a text file? This is something I have needed to do for a while... (in PowerPoint or Keynote).
For instance, take a text file with standard text and a separator to indicate the creation of a new slide be imported, and have it populate a presentation. The backgrounds and styles could be cleaned up afterwards, but preferably a way to specify a standard template in advance as well.
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Peter said 2:41AM on 3-28-2008
Hi
Where do I find the actions? I have 10.5.2 and Office 2008, but there are no automator actions for Office..
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