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.
This is pretty cool. I think I’m having a problem with the macros…sometimes the ticker doesn’t run at all? Any idea how I can tell ppt to always trust this presentation?
This happens to me every once in a while too.
When you open the presentation, you will see a bar appear beneath the ribbon bar, click the Options… button.
On the Security Options dialog, make sure you select the Enable this content option.
Very cool!