Hello. This is my first post and I'm not a computer person so please be gentle!
I have a sprawling PowerPoint slide deck that we use as a template which users can customize or rearrange the slides as needed for the situation. Many slides are only needed for certain clients or situations so our system is to have a text box on the variable slides that read "[Only for Clients with Product A]", "[Only for Clients with Product B]", and so on. When an employee needs to customize the template they then need to manually go through the PowerPoint and delete the slides not meant for that situation and then delete only the text boxes on the slides that should be kept. This works well enough but is very time consuming and is vulnerable to user error, as I'm sure you can imagine.
What I would like to do, but don't know how, is to build a macro in excel (not PowerPoint) which would do the following:
1. Open the PowerPoint template. Let's say it is found at M:Presentations/Template5.ppt.
2. Conduct a Find-and-Replace-All sequence where it replaces all instances of "[Only for Clients with Product A]" with the phrase "[Delete this Text Box]".
3. Conduct a Find-and-Replace-All sequence where it replaces all instances of "[Only for Clients with Product B]" with the phrase "[Delete this Slide]".
4. Search through the slides and in each case where it finds "[Delete this Slide]" it deletes that specific slide.
5. Search through the slides and in each case where it finds "[Delete this Text Box]" it deletes (or hides) the text box.
Importantly, if there is a way to do this without knowing the exact slide number that would be ideal. I do not want to have to go into the macro to update it every time a slide is added or deleted from the master template, which makes more work that may be worth it.
Is what I am needing even possible? have you done this? Or is there a better way to do this, perhaps through shapes or symbols rather than text boxes (or if necessary, with Sections)? My limited experience with finding and replacing text and finding and deleting Bookmarks in Word Documents using Excel Macros tells me that this should be possible, but I am new to doing this with PowerPoint objects and am stumped.
Anything any of you can do to help me on the right track would be most appreciated. Thanks for your help, and please let me know if you have any questions. In case it matters we use Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019, Version 1808.
Bookmarks