One week in to learning to make PowerPoint Macros I feel I have learned a lot. First I decided to start development in PowerPoint itself as my development environment. I came to this decision after two fruitless days of trying to get Visual Studio to work. I have learned that PowerPoint itself is a fine development environment for Macros.

Most of what I have done so far is very basic stuff such as deleting all the empty text boxes in a presentation, adding slides with layouts and text, adding text-boxes with text, and adding text to existing text-boxes. Now I am working on a dialog window that will ask the user what slide they want a new Text box on and then place that text box.

The first step when figuring out a new programming language or method is usually to make a “hello world” type program and confirm it is working. Next you add in some more complex features until you are comfortable and can move on to real development.

I have often made the mistake of skipping this step. But this time I am not going to make that mistake… assuming I can get the development space to work. Specifically Visual Studio. I can’t seam to figure out how to get it to make a project for Microsoft Office applications. I have a few avenues of exploration to try and failing those I have an excellent mentor or two that can help me. I just was hoping I would need the help in the learning to run stage not the learning what my hands are stage.