PowerPoint OLE automation without making the window visible

[Mike Hearn]

Hi,

I'm sure this must be an FAQ so apologise in advance if you guys answer
it a lot, but I couldn't find anything on it in the FAQs I found on
Google, so here goes ....

I'm trying to get the textual contents of a presentation into another
app via OLE automation. I've got some code to do this and it works fine
*but* it requires the main PowerPoint window to be visible. This is a
big issue as I don't want it to disturb the user on the workstation
while my program is indexing these presentations so having it display,
index, then become invisible again is clearly unacceptable.

I have a nasty feeling the answer will be "you can't do that" as when I
try and open a presentation while the main window is invisible I get
this error:

"Invalid request. The PowerPoint Frame window does not exist."

If I force the window to be created (?) by setting Visible to FALSE, I
get this message:

"Invalid request. Hiding the application window is not allowed."

Gosh, I am naughty!

This is confusing because the exact same construct works fine in Word: I
can open a document, grab the text and close it without anything
appearing on screen.

Any ideas?

thanks -mike

 

[Shyam Pillai]

Mike,
You can certainly automate PowerPoint while keeping it invisible. In fact it
is more efficient to do so.

Dim AppPPT As Object
Dim oPres As Object
Set AppPPT = CreateObject("PowerPoint.Application")

' Though I've explicitly opened the presentation without window,
' if PowerPoint is invisible a Open call will automatically open it w/o a
window.
Set oPres = AppPPT.Presentations.Open("c:\sample.ppt", , , False)

On Error Resume Next
With oPres
For I = 1 To .Slides.Count
' ----
' ----
' ----
Next I
End With
oPres.Close
Set oPres = Nothing
AppPPT.Quit
Set AppPPT = Nothing

You should avoid common pitfalls:
- Ensure that you code does have bits which invoke 'Selection' calls. When
there is no UI the concept of selection does not exist.
- Ensure that you do not reference 'active' global objects like
ActivePresentation, ActiveWindow etc.
- Fully qualify all objects.
- If you are going to print from PowerPoint, turn off background printing.

 

[Mike Hearn]

Mike,
You can certainly automate PowerPoint while keeping it invisible. In fact it
is more efficient to do so.

Dim AppPPT As Object
Dim oPres As Object
Set AppPPT = CreateObject("PowerPoint.Application")

' Though I've explicitly opened the presentation without window,
' if PowerPoint is invisible a Open call will automatically open it w/o a
window.
Set oPres = AppPPT.Presentations.Open("c:\sample.ppt", , , False)

Thanks Shyam. I'm not using VBScript, but rather Java, and this line
made me notice what I was doing wrong: you have to specify you don't
want a window in the open call using an optional parameter. I set that,
and now it works.

thanks -mike