Recently a need came up for a user that wanted to post a PowerPoint slide with links embedded in it onto a SharePoint 2007 teamsite. Unfortunately, in Office 2010 the ability to Save As Web Page doesn’t exist anymore. It seems they are really promoting their PowerPoint services (Office Web Apps) and decided to remove this capability from the user interface. Fortunately, the backend code is still there to perform this function.
I found this forum post: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/officeappcompat/thread/89d70894-b455-4d3e-a801-f2574c3a0f5a talking about a quick way to save as html through the visual basic editor in PowerPoint. This was good but not very user friendly.
I decided to write my own PowerPoint Add-In to add a button in the ribbon that saves the presentation to html. Since this is my first add-in, it did take me a little while to get it working but I was really happy with the development experience. Hitting F5 compiled, built and deployed my add-in and then started powerpoint for me. This made debuging and testing really quick.
To get started I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a new PowerPoint 2010 Add-In. I then added a new item and selected Ribbon. I also added a button to the ribbon from the toolbox and created an on-click event for it. Below is the code for the on-click event:
SaveFileDialog saveFileDialog1 = new SaveFileDialog(); saveFileDialog1.Filter = "htm files (*.htm)|*.htm|All files (*.*)|*.*"; saveFileDialog1.FilterIndex = 0; saveFileDialog1.RestoreDirectory = true; saveFileDialog1.AddExtension = true; saveFileDialog1.AutoUpgradeEnabled = true; saveFileDialog1.CheckFileExists = false; saveFileDialog1.CheckPathExists = true; saveFileDialog1.DefaultExt = "htm"; if (saveFileDialog1.ShowDialog() != DialogResult.OK) return; string filepath = saveFileDialog1.FileName; Globals.SaveToHtml.Application.ActivePresentation.SaveAs(filepath, Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint.PpSaveAsFileType.ppSaveAsHTML, Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoTriState.msoFalse);
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:
One of the reasons it took me a while was I had issues getting it installed on another machine. It turns out I didn’t select Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime as a prerequisite to install under the publish settings. Once that was checked it installed fine on other machines.