Text replacement using constants

[Guest]

I'm looking for a straight-forward way of displaying constants in a
PowerPoint 2003 presentation. For example I need to display the same slowly
changing date in many places within the same presentation. By slowly
changing, I mean it may be changed manually every few weeks. I've seen
references to external sources such as Excel spreadsheets and text files, but
I'm trying to avoid using anything external to the PPT file.

I'd like to be able to just drop a reference to the constant on a page
without hooking code up to it.

Assuming the above is possible an improvement I'd like would be variables or
formulas based on the constant so I could display the value in the START_DATE
constant plus or minus 1 or more days.

 

[Guest]

You would have to write code to get exactly what you want. Two workarounds

Use Edit > Replace > replace all to change the date when needed. You could
have text eg "maindate" "date -1" and search for them and change to the
actual dates. Hope that makes sense!

Create a second slide master with the date on it. Apply this master ONLY to
the slides where you need the date (right click in the design pane and apply
to selected slides) and change the master as required.