I was recently asked to create a button with different visual states — normal , hover , and pressed . My first thought was to use a standard command button from the Developer tab. However, those buttons are rather bland and have that clunky 1980s PC look. I then recalled a couple of techniques I’ve used before to update slide content dynamically — either pulling data from a table or from another shape. Both are flexible approaches. The method I’ll show here uses a table — it’s simple, and with a bit of creativity, you’ll quickly see how this can be extended to build much more interesting interactions. The Process: On any slide create a shape I've put mine on the first slide hence in the script it reads ActivePresentation.Slides(1) when I refer to the path of the shape. You can change the number if your shape is on a different slide. Once you create your shape in the Selection Pane rename your object to myButton or something else that you can remember easily later. ...

I’ve seen plenty of solutions for building slideshow tutorials that use a callout with a speech tag pointing to the item of interest on the slide. Most of these approaches involve creating large numbers of slides with complex navigation — a real tangle to manage. The simplest method I’ve found is to use an array, an If statement, and the .Nodes.SetPosition method. I won’t include the full code here — that’s something I’ll save for a book I plan to publish later — but the example below should give you the idea. First, add a callout shape to your slide. Then right-click the callout and select Edit Points. Move the tip of the callout tag (the point with the yellow handle). This converts the callout into an object that you can control more flexibly with code. Now on the top ribbon choose the developer tab and then select the macro icon. If you can't see the developer tab in the ribbon, a quick Google search will bring up a bunch of tutorials on what to do to make it available an...

To begin with, I’m not aware of any other software that can create fully standalone multimedia interfaces — self-contained, requiring no external host — that are as widely accessible to PC users. While I know of tools like Apache or LibreOffice, they are neither popular nor readily supported in the organisation I work for. PowerPoint, on the other hand, is installed on every machine and regarded as an enterprise-grade solution — stable, secure, and universally accepted. It’s a shame that the world has largely moved away from SWF and ActionScript. I really enjoyed developing with AS2 and AS3 — Adobe Flash was one of the best animation tools around. I’ve explored Adobe Animate, which remains a good animation platform, but its HTML5 output isn’t consistently reliable across all browsers. In fact, a lot can go wrong with HTML5, especially when you want to create standalone applications — the limitations quickly become apparent. For me, PowerPoint still ticks all the boxes. It offers an exc...