De-crappifying bullet slides

[Rick Altman]

I'm writing up a procedure on repairing slides that were created
incorrectly. I have 20 bullet slides, all of which were created with text
boxes on blank layouts. That means there is no way to make them conform to
the slide master. I came up with the following workaround, but would love to
compare notes, as I'm sure there are others who have devised similar,
perhaps better, strategies:

1. Send the entire presentation out to PDF.

2. Open the PDF and immediately do a Save As to plain text.

3. Open the text file and identify titles, bullets, and sub-bullets with
tabs.

4. Now import that text file back to the PowerPoint file, where the tabs
tell PowerPoint how to handle the text (titles, bullets, subs).


It took me both Steps 1 and 2 to get the text in the file out to plain
text--that's the area where I'm wondering if there might be a better way.
But I couldn't find it. Anyone else...?

 

[Guest]

Hi Rick we've written a routine to decrappify (like it) slides where the
placeholder format has been trashed its at "Hands off my master" on
PowerPoint Alchemy. It won't sort out the text not in placeholders but may be
useful to you. I'll work on the current problem when I get time and get in
touch if you send me your email (I probably have it from PPTLive ) Any chance
of sending me a sample of crappified slides?

 

[Guest]

What I do:

Cut the text from the slide.

Apply the layout.

Paste the text in the layout. A lot of times I'll do Paste
Special>Unformatted Text--but only if it's major bullets without any sub
bullets. That tends to clear out any weird formatting.

Clean up any minor formatting issues. Usually there isn't much unless
someone hit enter at the end of every line.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I'm writing up a procedure on repairing slides that were created
incorrectly. I have 20 bullet slides, all of which were created with text
boxes on blank layouts. That means there is no way to make them conform to
the slide master. I came up with the following workaround, but would love to
compare notes, as I'm sure there are others who have devised similar,
perhaps better, strategies:

1. Send the entire presentation out to PDF.

2. Open the PDF and immediately do a Save As to plain text.

To clean the text, you should be able to skip the PDF, just copy and paste the
text to Notepad.

3. Open the text file and identify titles, bullets, and sub-bullets with
tabs.

4. Now import that text file back to the PowerPoint file, where the tabs
tell PowerPoint how to handle the text (titles, bullets, subs).

And in many cases, you can add a new text/bullet slide, select/copy the
original text, click in the bullet placeholder of the new slide and paste (and
if you get the little icon at the bottom corner of the pasted text, choose the
option to keep master formatting rather than source formatting. That will
retain any bold/similar attributes the user has applied but will reset the font
to that chosen for the master.

Both of these are slide-by-slide deals rather than a one-shot that gives you
all the text in one file, but in the long run may take less time since the text
indents are preserved.

Which is better depends on the presentation.

Gazillions of slides, not a lot of tricky bullet point formatting, do the PDF
--> Text trick or search www.pptfaq.com, the VB section for a macro that
exports the text directly to notepad.

Fewer slides, more formatting, I'd go with my alternate method.

 

[Rick Altman]

To Linda and Steve --

You both make excellent points, completely valid for a few slides that are
done wrong. But in doing the research for this book I'm working on, I'm
seeing a level of slide mismanagement that I would never have imagined. Like
a slide deck consisting of 250 slides, *every single one* produced on the
blank layout with text boxes.

It's these big mongo disasters that I'm addressing, and for that, a
cut-and-paste procedure just won't fly, unless it could be scripted to occur
automatically and to work across multiple slides at once.

My quest, therefore, is to get the text out to Notepad as efficiently as
possible, and to that end, I haven't found anything that beats the PDF
route. Steve, did you say that there IS a script that handles the export
directly to text? If so, I'd love to know about it...




Rick A.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

To Linda and Steve --

You both make excellent points, completely valid for a few slides that are
done wrong. But in doing the research for this book I'm working on, I'm
seeing a level of slide mismanagement that I would never have imagined. Like
a slide deck consisting of 250 slides, *every single one* produced on the
blank layout with text boxes.

Pretty standard stuff, actually. Happens all the time: User adds a new slide,
sees the placeholders PPT supplies, thinks "That's not formatted the way I want
it" and deletes same, adds freeform text boxes.

It's these big mongo disasters that I'm addressing, and for that, a
cut-and-paste procedure just won't fly, unless it could be scripted to occur
automatically and to work across multiple slides at once.

My quest, therefore, is to get the text out to Notepad as efficiently as
possible, and to that end, I haven't found anything that beats the PDF
route. Steve, did you say that there IS a script that handles the export
directly to text? If so, I'd love to know about it...

Export Text to a text file, extract text from PowerPoint (Mac or PC)
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00274.htm

But whether it works well in this situation or not will depend on the slides.
Because the text isn't in text placeholders, there's no way to know which of
(potentially) several text boxes is supposed to be the title and which the body
text (and which extraneous bits that should be ignored.)

 

[Guest]

I'd like to see a few of those slides Rick. We had a similar problem and have
a vba module that (for us ) sorted it out automatically. In our case the
slides were all texxt boxes (no placeholders) but all mimicked the standard
title and text or title and two text layout.