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Slide Notes to text file with VBA

by | Apr 4, 2014 | Blog, VBA Macros | 6 comments

Slide Notes to text file with VBA

Sometimes you find you need to remove the comments from your PowerPoint presentation before distributing to your audience. But what if you want to keep a permanent copy of them?

The VBA macro below exports all of your PowerPoint slide notes to a plain text file.

To use the macro, press Alt+F11 in PowerPoint and right click on the VBA project to insert a module before copying and pasting the code from below. You can then run it from within the VBE (Visual Basic Editor) or by pressing Alt+F8 in PowerPoint or by assigning the macro to an object on your slide as an Action.

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Sub SaveNotesToFile()
  Dim oSld As Slide
  Dim sFileName As String
  Dim sDivider As String
  Dim sSlideNote As String
  Dim iReturnPos As Integer
  Dim sLine As String
 
  ' Change this to your required file or use a file system object to get a folder
  sFileName = "C:\Temp\SlideNotes.txt"
    
  ' Open a text file ready for writing to
  Open sFileName For Output As #1
    With ActivePresentation
      ' Write the presentation name as the file header
      Print #1, "Presentation : " & .FullName
      sDivider = String(Len("Presentation : " & .FullName), "=")
      Print #1, sDivider
    End With
    
  ' Treat each slide in the presentation
  For Each oSld In ActivePresentation.Slides
    ' Write a label (could also include slide title with more code)
    Print #1, "[SLIDE " & oSld.slideIndex & " NOTES]"
    ' Get the slide note text
    sSlideNote = oSld.NotesPage.Shapes.Placeholders(2).TextFrame.TextRange.Text
    ' Replace carriage return characters with a CR + LF so that multiple lines get output correctly
    sSlideNote = Replace(sSlideNote, Chr(13), vbCrLf)
    ' Output the slide note to the text file
    Print #1, sSlideNote
    Print #1, sDivider
  Next
    
  Close #1
  Shell "explorer.exe /root,C:\Temp\SlideNotes.txt", vbNormalFocus
End Sub

6 Comments

  1. Yogesh
    Yogesh on April 14, 2014 at 6:09 am

    Hi,

    I tried the above code; however, it doesn’t work. Though it creates a text file, the file just has the following.
    Presentation : Presentation1
    ============================
    === Notes from slide 1 :
    ============================
    === Notes from slide 2 :
    ============================

    I actually want to export all PPT Comments to an excel sheet. Please let me know if it’s possible.

    Thanks,
    Yogesh

    Reply
    • Jamie
      Jamie on April 14, 2014 at 7:05 am

      What version of PowerPoint and Windows are you using? It is technically possible to export to an Excel file.

      Reply
      • Jamie
        Jamie on October 16, 2014 at 8:17 am

        It’s fixed now Yogesh. IT wasn’t dealing with single line comments but does now. It also open the text file after creating it. You can import the text file into Excel or modify the macro to do that for you.

        Reply
        • Yogesh
          Yogesh on October 17, 2014 at 3:23 pm

          Hi Jamie,

          Thanks for your response. I am now trying to export comments to an Excel Sheet or rather a .csv file and was quite successful in doing it. The slide numbers along with comments were directly exported in the .csv file. However, the .csv file didn’t have good formatting, for example, the columns weren’t appropriately adjusted.

          My question is along with exporting the file, can we also define the formatting for the excel file? So that after exporting, one doesn’t need to format the excel file. The user gets a ready made file.

          Thanks for your help,
          Yogesh

          Reply
          • Jamie
            Jamie on October 17, 2014 at 4:08 pm

            Are you using the modified macro or the G-Tools add-in Yogesh? A CSV file only contains delimited text data and cannot contain formatting (Excel creates some default formatting when it “imports” CSV data to a sheet). So formatting columns, rows, fonts etc. is only possible when saving to an Excel (.xls etc.) formatted file. The G-Tools add-in does some basic formatting but I guess there may be a lot of different formatting needs from different users so it could be difficult to satisfy all needs.

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