Friday, February 11, 2011

ESPN Ticker in PowerPoint

Throughout my career, I have made countless presentations and almost every single one of them has been delivered with Microsoft PowerPoint. I am a huge sports fan and watch a lot of ESPN and have always liked the ticker that appears at the bottom of the screen.


I figured it would be interesting to have an ESPN-like ticker at the bottom of my presentation and although it’s not appropriate for all audiences, it is pretty cool.

It works by handling internal PowerPoint events through macro code (hit Alt-F11 to view the code editor) and reads the tabs and messages at runtime from a XML file in the same directory as the presentation. Please note that I’ve only tested this with PowerPoint 2007, but it should work with 2010 and probably 2003.

A few quick notes:
1. You need to install EventGen12 add-in, which redirects PowerPoint events to actual presentations. http://officeone.mvps.org/eventgen/eventgen.html

2. Make sure you enable macros when prompted in PowerPoint.

3. The code that performs the work relies on the ticker shapes in the presentation to be named in a particular way, so it’s generally easiest to simply copy an existing slide from the sample and then make your content changes. But, if you’d like to change them, there’s also a ‘NameShape’ macro included as well.

4. The speed of the ticker is controlled by adjusting the ‘timer_interval’ value in ‘ticker_msgs.xml’.

Download Complete Sample (includes source code, sample presentation and XML)

A quick video demonstration of how it looks in action.


1 comment:

  1. This is sweet! I used it for a presentation and they absolutely loved it.

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