PowerPoint and Visual Basic for Applications
VBA (also known as Visual Basic for Applications) adds a new multi-function feature in PowerPoint. That lets you to extend the applications for the several purposes. So, before we go in deep let’s discuss about the basic terms.
What is PowerPoint?
PowerPoint is a complete presentation graphics package. It helps you to create a professional-looking presentation with a series of PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint offers word processing, outlining, drawing, graphing, and presentation management tools- all designed to be easy to use and learn.
They have included templates which enhance your presentation. You can create your custom templates too manually. You can even add Images, Audio, and Video etc. in your slides, you can also import and embed various elements from other Office suite products like Excel Spreadsheets, Word documents, etc.
What is a Visual Basic for Applications?
Visual Basic for Applications enables building user defined functions, automating processes and accessing Windows API and other low-level functionality through dynamic-link libraries (DLLs). It can be used with Microsoft products like, Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
So, how we should and why we should use the Virtual Basic Applications with Microsoft Power Point to enhance our presentations.
How can VBA promote your PowerPoint Presentation
By using PowerPoint and Visual Basic for Applications we can make effective and engaging presentations. For example we can create Macros or we can create a quiz in our presentations that is , in each slide ask questions and display answer choices and allow user to choose an answer. If the answer is corrected it will display a congratulation message and proceed to the next question which is in another slide. If the answer user ticked is wrong it display a ,say “try again” or whatever we feed as an input.
Isn’t it exciting? There are such many applications which we can integrate in our presentations to make it catchy and engaging. You can save a tons of your time by using an VBA Application in your PowerPoint presentation. There are several other intuitive modification options proved by VBA such as Saving PowerPoint Slides as JPEG Images
The another exciting feature is like by using VBA in PowerPoint you can create a VBA macro that runs in the exact middle of your presentation, no matter how many slides that you have, and pops up a message that states or displays the time left for your presentation.
VBA for PowerPoint works by running Macros. Yeah it is kind of hectic to learn programming but once you learn basics of VBA it would be easier to learn the advanced sub topics. Here we are listing some few books which will help you to learn VBA effectively –
- Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Book & CD-ROM) by John WalkenbachRahmel’s
- VBA Developer’s Handbook, 2nd Edition by Ken Getz
- Mastering VBA by Guy Hart-Davis
Follow these books or you can even download the tutorials from YouTube and Google.