Open a PowerPoint presentation from Excel with VBA and then set that presentation to a variable

Question

I have to post a lot of Excel charts to a specific PowerPoint document and I'm building out a macro in Excel VBA to do it for me.

I'm able to correctly open the PowerPoint presentation that I want to update, however I don't know how to set the presentation I just opened to a variable called MyPresentation .

Dim myPresentation As PowerPoint.Presentation
Dim PowerPointApp As PowerPoint.Application

PowerPointApp.Presentations.Open Filename:="obscured filepath and name"`

Obviously there's some additional code, but I'm trying to set the Presentation I just opened in line 3 set to the MyPresentation variable so I can reference the document I just opened.

Answer 1

First you have to pave the way for using ppt files, what I did:

Dim DestinationPPT As String
Dim PowerPointApp As PowerPoint.Application
Dim myPresentation As PowerPoint.Presentation

Set PowerPointApp = CreateObject("PowerPoint.Application")

DestinationPPT = "path"
PowerPointApp.Presentations.Open (DestinationPPT)

Answer 2

I ended up finding a solution by the MVP Andy Pope.

Some relevant code snippets for future users. (FYI My PPT was already visible when I ran into the problem)

Dim DestinationPPT As String
Dim PowerPointApp As PowerPoint.Application
Dim myPresentation As PowerPoint.Presentation

'Easier to define manually set links up front so it's easier to change/modify
DestinationPPT = "C:\yourfilepath\yourfilename.pptx"`

Lookup the Spreadsheet Guru's guide to opening PPT from Excel VBA

Then:

Set myPresentation = PowerPointApp.Presentations.Open(DestinationPPT)

Answer 3

I was trying to create an excel file that can generate a predefined powerpoint presentation on the basis of a specific worksheet, with different values within the excel-file.

My issue was that every person in my department should be able to download the excel-file and run it.

Defining Presentations within vba doesn't work for everyone since the reference that is required for this action isn't activated on every computer/excel-programm.

Createobject did the trick for me to get around the problem. Here the code i am talking about:

Dim pptApp as object
Dim strpath as string

strpath = ThisWorkbook.Path & "\Test_Dummy.pptx"
Set pptApp =  createobject("Powerpoint.application")

pptApp.Presentations.Open Filename:=strpath, readonly:=false, untitled:=true, withwindow:=true

What didn't work was stuff like:

Dim pptApp as Powerpoint.Application

or

Dim pptApp as object
Set pptApp = New Powerpoint.Application

without setting the required references in vba

Answer 4

This one worked for me:

'devlare variables
Dim MyPPT As Object

'create PowerPoint
Set MyPPT = CreateObject("Powerpoint.application")
'make it visible
MyPPT.Visible = True
'path to powerpoint
MyPPT.presentations.Open "path\powerpoint.pptx"

Set visible to true, before open it. otherwise it did not worked for me