Friday, March 05, 2010

PowerPoint 2007 Macro Recorder

One of the biggest issues with Office 2007, at least for developers, is that Microsoft removed the Macro Recorder from PowerPoint.  The Macro Recorder was a great time saver for developers trying to automate Office applications from within their own applications.  You didn't have to struggle with figuring out the syntax for what you wanted to do, you just did it within the program with the macro recorder on, and then translated the resulting VBA macro into the automation commands you needed to use.  It wasn't removed from the other Office products, and with the large number of rather significant bugs in PowerPoint with the original 2007 release, it sure looks like the PowerPoint folks weren't done withe product by the time everybody else was, and Microsoft just shipped it as is.

Well, the good news is that the Macro Recorder isn't gone, it's just not as easy to get to.  All you need to do is type the Office 2003 easy access key sequence ( Alt-T, M, R ) and sure enough, the Macro Recorder starts.  Type it again to stop the Macro Recorder.  Then you can use the Alt-F11 key to open the VBA editor and see the results.

2 comments:

Oliver Snow said...

which version of PowerPoint? I have tried this in 2007 SP2. While it creates a new macro, it does not record any content for insertion, deletion of shapes. It did record a save file event.

Does anybody else have this problem?

vp said...

i couldnt work it out either! nothing records!