PowerPoint: Repeat text on every slide

Question

I'm working on creating a PowerPoint template for daily class presentations. In the template I'd like to have a hunk of text that is prominently displayed on the first slide and which repeats at the bottom of the subsequent slides at the bottom in a smaller size. The text will change every day.

The ideas I've had so far:

• Use a text field. As far as I can tell, PowerPoint doesn't have anything like a text field that can be dynamically set.
• Use a footer - this works and I can modify the master to get the look I want, but I'd really like to be picking up the value of the text from the first page so that edits would be automatically applied and to save the initial step of setting the footer.
• Using VBA - I'd be willing to give this a shot, but I've never used VBA and the learning curve seems steep so it would be nice to know if the idea is feasible in VBA.

Can this be done? How would you approach it?

Here's an example of what I'm hoping to be able to do. Ideally the solution would work on both the Mac (2013) and Windows (2016) version of PowerPoint.

Answer 1

You can connect your presentation with an excel file. And running the code in the ppt would pull out the text in the excel file and update the titles instantly.

Create a presentation with a textbox with some temporary text. Put the below code in ppt. save as pptm.

Sub AddMotionPath()

    Dim Temp As String

Excel.Application.Workbooks.Open ("D:\Users\Desktop\Book1.xlsx") ' update the path of the excel file
Workbooks("Book1.xlsx").Activate 'activate the file

For p = 1 To 4
Temp = Workbooks("Book1.xlsx").Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("B" & p + 1).Value ' Column B has the titles
 ActivePresentation.Slides(p).Shapes(1).TextFrame.TextRange.Text = Temp ' this updates the titles from excel to ppt slide
Next
Excel.Application.Workbooks("Book1.xlsx").Close False 'closes the excel file

End Sub

Let me know if this works for you. You can update the excel file and run the macro in ppt. The text in the slides will be updated automatically.