Not all PowerPoint presentations are meant to be viewed in front of a large audience. Many presentations are designed for individual viewing at the user’s leisure.
When you’re creating a single user PowerPoint presentation and when you need to gather information from that user you can do it using ActiveX controls. In this article, I’ll show you how to do this in PowerPoint 2007.
To start you need to display the PowerPoint Developer tab on the Ribbon. Click the Office button, choose PowerPoint Options > Popular and enable the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon checkbox and click OK. The Developer tab provides access to the ActiveX controls central to this solution.
» Create the Form Objects
Now add a new slide to your presentation — choose one with only the title and no placeholders. Click the Developer tab, click the Label (ActiveX Control), and drag to create a Label on the slide.
Right click the Label, choose Properties, and in the properties dialog locate the Caption property and set it to read “Your Name:” (without the quote marks). The caption will appear in the label on the slide. Size the label just large enough to display its text.
You’ll use a textbox for the user to type their name, so click the Text Box (ActiveX Control) on the tab and drag a textbox onto the slide. You can now add another label and textbox combination. This time set the Label’s caption property to Email Address. You can continue to add more labels and textboxes for any other information that you want to retrieve from your user.
To format the Labels and Textboxes, click on each in turn and, from the Properties dialog, click in the Font area and double-click the ellipsis button to open the Font dialog to change the font of that object.
Finish the project by clicking the Command Button (ActiveX Control) and click and drag a button onto your form. Change the button’s Caption property to read Submit.
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