Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

GotoSlide
Method . . . . . 166
9.5 VBA Ed i tor Sug gests Pa ram e ters for the
AddShape
Method . . . . . . 167
10.1 Template for An imal Pro ject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
10.2 Choos ing Design Template As the File Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
10.3 Slides for Pick-A-Partner Template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
10.4 Pick-A-Partner VBA Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
10.5 Ex ample of Slide Created When Someone Has Cho sen to
Work with You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
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Pref ace
Most ed u ca tors have cre 
ated sim 
ple pre 
sen ta tions with PowerPoint®.
PowerPoint is a fine tool for add ing me dia to a lec ture, but it falls flat when cre at-
ing in teractive lessons for stu dents to use while sit ting in front of the com puter.
That is, it falls flat un less you use the built-in script ing fea tures of PowerPoint.
Starting with PowerPoint version 97, every copy of PowerPoint comes with
Visual Ba sic® for Applications (VBA). VBA can be used to add to the functional-
ity of Microsoft Of fice® ap pli ca tions, in clud ing Microsoft PowerPoint. With
the advent of PowerPoint 97, teachers can put lim ited interactivity into their pre-
sentations using action settings, hyperlinks, and but tons. These features al low
you to
• add but tons to control navigation (start your slide show with a menu,
for ex ample, rather than requiring lin ear nav igation, from slide to
slide to slide);
• jump to other PowerPoint pre sentations, other files, or Web pages;
and
• cre ate ru di men tary mul ti ple-choice tests (click ing on a but ton with
the correct an swer takes the student to a slide that says “cor rect,” for
example).
While this interactivity is use ful, it is also very lim ited. VBA ex tends this to 
nearly un limited dimensions. With VBA, you can change the con tent and ap -
pearance of slides based on student in put, ask for and process typed in put, add
additional slides, hide and show graphics, and much more.
“Wait!” I hear you cry. VBA is a so phisticated pro gramming language. Can 
teachers be come programmers? Cer tainly, many teachers can become program-
mers, but the goal is not to create
pro gram mers
but rather
scripters
. A pro gram-
mer learns all the sub tleties of a com puter lan guage in min ute de tail. A scripter
might learn some of the details of the lan guage but, more im portant, learns a few
easily mod ifiable scripts that can per form im portant tasks. Script ing is well
within the reach of many teachers, and taking ad 
vantage of the power of
authoring sys tems like PowerPoint is an important part of the In ternational So ci-
ety for Technology in Ed ucation (2001) standards for programs in technology
facilitation:
• Standard III.A.7—Use methods for teaching con cepts and skills that 
support use of web-based and non web-based authoring tools in a
school en vi ron ment.

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• Stan dard III.C.1—Use meth ods and fa cil i tate strat e gies for teach ing
prob lem solv ing prin ci ples and skills us ing tech nol ogy resources.
• Standard V.C.7—Use examples of emerging pro gramming, authoring
or prob lem solv ing en vironments that sup port personal and pro fes-
sional de vel op ment
Scripting might not be a use ful technique when used with a stand-alone
programming language, but the real power of us ing VBA with PowerPoint is not
merely that VBA is an ac cessible script ing lan guage but that it is built into
PowerPoint. One of my stu dents created a presentation about Ha waii. It included
pictures, vid eos, re corded voices, and links to Web sites. All of this used tradi-
tional PowerPoint technology (no scripting re quired). On top of that, it added an
interactive menu and a quiz with feedback about how well the user did on the
quiz. Building all of this from scratch with a pro gramming or authoring tool
could be an overwhelming task, but 95 percent of the presentation was done with
traditional PowerPoint tools (things most teachers al ready know how to do or
can learn within a cou ple of hours). When a few scripts are added on top of the
traditional PowerPoint tools, the re sults are rich not only with media but also
with interactivity.
Remember, the more you know, the more you can do. With a few scripts,
you can add short-answer questions (with feedback about right and wrong an-
swers) and keep score. Add a few more scripts and you can have a menu that
keeps track of which sections of your pre sentation have been visited and only
shows the but ton to take the quiz when all sections have been vis ited. Add a few
more scripts and you can have the user type things that change the slides in the
pre sen ta tion. The pos si bil i ties are endless.
The more you know, the more you can do. And you can always add more
traditional PowerPoint without know ing any more VBA.
I have been using this ma terial (be fore writing a book about it) with my stu-
dents, who are mostly teachers, en rolled in a graduate course in multimedia de-
sign for the classroom, for about four years. They have created pow erful pro jects
for their students (like the Hawaii pro ject mentioned earlier). In addition, I have
been speaking about this at con ferences and workshops. The overwhelming re -
action I get is, “That’s great! I didn’t know you could do that.”
While this book is not accessible for com puter nov ices, teachers who are
beyond the level of computer beginner can use this technology to create pow er-
ful material for their students, material that goes be yond a simple page-turner.
For the pro fessional mul timedia designer, PowerPoint might not be the
right choice. How ever, ex pensive and complicated tools are not common in
schools. Using PowerPoint as a framework, teachers are able to add as much or
as lit 
tle interactivity as their skills allow and their needs re 
quire. Thus,
PowerPoint is an ap propriate mul timedia tool for teachers and a powerful ad di-
tion to a multimedia design class.
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This book can be used as a stand-alone book in a mul timedia design class
for ed ucators or as a com panion for books like Ivers and Barron (2002) or
Agnew, Kellerman, and Meyer (1996), which fo cus on multimedia design and
using mul timedia pro jects in classrooms but do not deal with a specific technol-
ogy for implementing the projects. It also stands by it self without a class. Any -
one with ba sic PowerPoint skills can sit down with this book and be gin to create
pow er ful ed u ca tional ma te rial for them selves, their col leagues, their students, or
their own children.
Chapter 1 begins the book with some important principles of in structional
design, including how to design your own pro jects and create as signments for
your stu dents to de sign their pro jects. If this book is used in conjunction with a
book about design, the first chapter will pro vide an over view of what you will
find in the de sign books, but if this book is used by itself, this chap ter is very im -
portant. Jump ing in and creating things is fine when you are play ing around, but
serious pro jects require some planning and design work, and Chapter 1 will give
you a foundation in that.
Chap ter 2 be gins to ex plore some of the tra di tional in ter ac tive mul ti me dia
features of PowerPoint. Add ing pic tures, sounds, but tons, and hyperlinks is not
difficult, but many PowerPoint users have never used those features before.
Chapter 3 introduces VBA. You’ll un derstand how VBA fits into the world
of ob ject-oriented pro gramming and how that af fects you as a scripter. As a
scripter, you won’t have to un derstand all of VBA and ob ject-oriented pro gram-
ming, but un derstanding ob jects and how to manipulate them will help you un -
derstand your scripts.
Chapter 4 begins the heart of the book as you start to learn about scripting
with VBA. You’ll learn how VBA is connected to PowerPoint and how to write
and run your first script. You’ll also learn about keeping your scripts pri vate so
your stu dents can’t look for the an swers in your scripts.
Chapters 5 and 6 build your bag of scripting tricks. As a scripter, you will
be in terested in taking scripts di rectly from these chapters and ap plying them to
your own pur poses.
While each chap ter contains ex amples that you can use right away, Chapter
7 fo cuses on ex amples that you will be able to use to create quiz zes and tests.
Once you have completed Chap ter 7, you will have a large bag of tricks that 
you can use by copy ing scripts di rectly from the book and pos sibly creating
some on your own. Chapter 8 describes some more tricks that you can use, par -
ticularly if you are ready to modify some of the ideas in the book for your own
purposes. It ends with a powerful ex ample that I use with my daugh ter as she is
learning to read.
Once you have mastered a large bag of tricks, you might need some help cor -
recting your mistakes. Whenever you write scripts, even if you just copy them
from the book, you are likely to make a few mistakes. Fix ing mistakes is called
debugging, and you will learn some of the secrets of debugging in Chapter 9.
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By the time you fin ish Chapter 9, you will be ex cited to create things your-
self, but you might want to share your knowledge with your colleagues and your
students. Some of them will share your enthusiasm and bor row your copy of this
book (or better yet, buy their own copy) and dive right into powerful
PowerPoint. Others won’t be ready for the technical challenge. Chap ter 10 de-
scribes how you can use templates, so your col leagues and stu dents can take full
advantage of the power of VBA scripting without know ing any of it. You can
use what you learn in Chapter 10 to pro vide a template for your colleagues or
students with the scripting already done for them (by you).
When you have completed the book, you might not be an ex pert at us ing
VBA to cre ate pow erful in teractive mul timedia pro jects, but you will have a
large bag of tricks that can help you do more with technology to make you a
better educator.
Writing this book has been a long pro cess. I began my journey when I at -
tended a presentation at a con ference in which the speaker was talking about all
the exciting ed ucational things that can be done with PowerPoint. I thought that
he was talking about the things this book discusses, but I was wrong. I started ex -
ploring, and I found that no one was talking about these things, at least not for
educators. As I looked for books to help me, I found many (look in the Refer-
ences section at the end of the book), but none was geared to ed ucators or to us -
ing PowerPoint interactively. I wanted to share this with my students, so I started
creating my own hand outs. As the hand outs grew, I began speaking about this at
conferences and giving work shops. Everyone was amazed at what PowerPoint
could do. By the time the hand outs reached sev enty pages, I knew it was time to
move from handouts to a book.
I would like to thank all the people who helped me along the way, but they
are too nu merous to mention, so I will mention only a few. I would like to thank
all my stu dents over the years in Mul timedia Design in the Classroom, particu-
larly the first group, who had to en dure the course with a few pages of handouts
that were be ing written dur ing the course, in most cases the night be fore each
class. I also would like to thank Di ana Sucich, one of my stu dents who reviewed
the manuscript as it was morphing from a seventy-page packet of handouts into a 
book. Her com ments were in valuable. I also would like to thank Luis Bango, a
former stu dent who suf fered through Mul timedia Design in the Classroom while
the handouts were not in the best shape and reviewed the fi nal manuscript. I also
would like to thank the PowerPoint MVPs in the Microsoft PowerPoint
newsgroup. Several PowerPoint experts give their time in that newsgroup to an-
swer questions from beginners and ex perts alike with beginning PowerPoint
questions and complex scripting questions.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. My wife Emily has pro vided me
with un ending love and sup port as I have stayed late in the of fice to work on the
book. My daugh ter Ella has been a guinea pig for some of my wacky projects,
particularly the example at the end of Chapter 9. Both my chil dren, Ella and Ada, 
have provided me with love and in spiration be cause I hope that my work will
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help my chil dren and all children by making the computer a more ef fective tool
for education.
You are about to embark on a great jour ney. At times you will be elated and
at times frus trated. If you per severe, you will have the power to make the com-
puter do what you want it to, so it can be a tool for you and your stu dents’ learn -
ing. The com puter shouldn’t be everything in education, but when it is used, it
should be used powerfully and effectively.
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