We’ll begin by creating a macro called Add_10_Slides in PowerPoint. For basic instructions on how to create a macro, refer to Part 2 of this series.
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When the Visual Basic Editor window opens, the cursor prompt will be positioned between the
Sub Add_10_Slides( ) and
End Sub statements. We will want all the code for the macro to be contained between these two lines.
The VBA statement used to add a single blank slide to a presentation is of this form:
ActivePresentation.Slides.Add X, ppLayoutBlank
In this statement, X represents an integer value and denotes the position where you want the additional slide inserted. For example, if you wanted the inserted slide to be the second one in your presentation, appearing immediately after the title slide, the X would be replaced by 2.
In our macro, we want the inserted slides to appear at the end of the presentation, and that numeric position is likely to be different in every one. So, we will need to use a value for X that takes this into consideration. We can do this using the Count property.
More specifically, the statement ActivePresentation.Slides.Count can be used to tell us the number of slides that currently exist in our active presentation. Thus, if we want to insert a new slide that will appear at the end of the presentation, it would be at position ActivePresentation.Slides.Count + 1. This changes our full VBA statement to add a blank slide to the end of a presentation, to the following.
ActivePresentation.Slides.Add (ActivePresentation.Slides.Count + 1), ppLayoutBlank
The ppLayoutBlank portion of this statement indicates that we are adding a blank slide rather than one of another layout type. You can substitute this for any other layout type in PowerPoint. For instance, if you would rather insert a slide that includes a text box, you can change ppLayoutBlank to ppLayoutText. In Part 5 of this series, we’ll go into more detail about these different formats.
As this code will only add a single blank slide to the end of a presentation, we need to add a loop so that ten slides of this type will be added. This would change our macro code to the following.
For i = 1 To 10
ActivePresentation.Slides.Add (ActivePresentation.Slides.Count + 1), ppLayoutBlank
Next i
If we wanted to, we could stop here and have a fully functional macro to accomplish our intended goal of adding ten blank slides to the end of a presentation. However, sometimes it is nice to add a message box to the end of a macro to confirm that the task was completed.
MsgBox ("Ten blank slides have been added.")
This would produce the following message box after the macro has been run.
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Including this statement to create a message box in the macro is entirely optional. If message boxes annoy you or slow you down, you can decide not to add this last statement.
This final screenshot shows how the entire macro code for inserting ten blank slides into a PowerPoint 2007 presentation would appear in the Visual Basic Editor.
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