Saving information from a series of sets of option buttons

[Kate]

Hi,

I'm running an experiment in powerpoint where after a set of slides, I need
people to respond to a question about what they've just seen. This is
repeated several times, each time requiring a response. I've set this up
with (in the simplest case) a pair of 'Yes' and 'No' option buttons.

Unfortunately, when I test run the presentation, filling in each selection,
only the last slide containing option buttons retains the selection - the
others are blank. I know there could be several reasons for this, and I would
normally trawl through the tutorials and forums, but I'm really under time
pressure, and since a quick look hasn't helped I thought I'd just ask!

The first thing I thought may have caused problems is that I've copied and
pasted the slides (since there are 48 repetitions), so the option buttons
have the same names on all the slides. However, I've tried calling them
different things, and this hasn't helped.

More fundamentally, I haven't saved the presentation including macros. I was
hoping they wouldn't be necessary, since I don't want powerpoint to do
anything with the information from the options, just to have the value
property set to true or false, and I was hoping to save people the confusion
of allowing macros to run. However, I understand this may be a necessary
complication.

If I do need to include macros, could someone clarify whether or not I would
need to give each option button a unique name, or whether the fact that they
are on different slides will suffice. Also, can anyone suggest a simple code
to save the information within the presentation? I'm happy to manually get
the results rather than have an output file, since this will be done on
people's home computers and so creating and saving an output file would
probably be too messy, but I do need all the option button sets to retain
their information throughout the presentation and save it when the file is
saved, so that I can access it later.

I hope I'm being clear, I'm worried I'm not.

Any help would be hugely appreciated!

Kate

 

[Kate]

Don't worry, someone has helped me with the solution (which as I'd expected
was embarrassingly simple).

For others with a similar problem: since I had copied and pasted the slides,
the optionbuttons all had the same 'group name' property, which was Slide11
(the slide I had copied from). Thus, when I selected a new choice further in
the presentation, the old information was wiped out. The simple solution was
to change the group name property so that each set of optionbuttons had a
unique slide number as their group name.

 

[Kate]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it.

I asked this question on another forum, and someone pointed to a wonderfully
simple solution, which I've explained in a reply to my original post, but you
may not be able to see it yet. The problem seems to be that when you copy and
paste sets of optionbuttons, their 'group name' property is always the same
(usually the slide name of the slide copied from, rather than updating to the
slide they now exist on). I assume this means that any information you put in
in any set wipes the previous info. That is presumably why optionbutton sets
created seperately do not overwrite each other - when created seperately they
have a unique group name for each set/slide.

So I've just changed the group name for each button on each slide, so that
each set has its own group name. Not the most time-economical solution, but
I'm just happy it works at this stage!

Thanks again for your help.

Kate

 

[Kate]

I agree it's a bug - it will be unhelpful in almost all situations to have
option buttons on seperate slides belonging to the same group!

Also huge thanks for that code, Steve, it's just saved me an absolute
nightmare:

I had a second presentation to set up, only this time on each repetition, I
needed three groups of options on each page (2, 5 and 6 buttons in each
group). So when copying and pasting I would have had to change each of the 13
optionbutton group names to one of three group names on every slide!

As it is, I just gave each group on the original slide a unique name, copied
and pasted the slides, and then ran the code you suggested with a slight
alteration so that it appended the name with the slide number, rather than
set it outright. This meant that each group still had a unique group name.

I do have some basic coding knowledge, but it's really tricky when you're
not familiar with a certain program/language and don't know what tools you
have at your hands. So while altering your code was easy, I could never have
thought it up myself.

So once again, thanks.

Kate