Using VBA in PowerPoint

You can use VBA (VisualBasic for Applications) in PowerPoint to make effective and engaging presentations but also to automate your presentations.

By using VBA you can perform mundane, repetitive task, or automated tasks. VBA is a programming language that lets you extend those applications and achieve further results in terms of UI or data gathering in PowerPoint to enhance your presentations.

VBA is supported on macros, that produces step by step procedures writing in Visual Basic. As any other programming language, there is a learning curve that you need to face, but despite it could be intimidating at a glance, with some patience some VBA examples you may find that learning even a small amount of VBA code makes their work easier and gives them the ability to do things in Office that they did not think were possible.

Automating repetitive tasks is maybe the reason why many users choose to use VBA instead of the conventional features of PowerPoint.

For example, suppose that you have a presentation that contains many empty text boxes that you want to delete. Instead of going to each slide and finding, selecting, and deleting each empty text box, you can have a PowerPoint VBA macro do it for you.

Another common reason to use PowerPoint VBA is to add new capabilities to PowerPoint. For example, you can create a VBA macro that runs in the exact middle of your presentation, no matter how many slides that you have, and pops up a message that states how much time that you have left for your presentation.

You can pull data from CSV comma separated text and embed it in an elegant way in PowerPoint slides, or you can grab data from Google Analytics or database source and then display nice charts with your website analytics in PowerPoint presentations.