An Overlooked Use of PowerPoint

MS PowerPoint is probably the least appreciated applications in MS Office. Often maligned for limiting creativity, MS PowerPoint gets little attention from developers. As of the writing of this post, there is no specific forum for MS PowerPoint on the Microsoft Developers Network Forums. Many of the snippets I've seen are written to update material in an existing presentation. Much like updating a report that will be presented on a regular basis, data is pushed or pulled into specific Placeholders, Text Ranges, and/or embedded Worksheets. As usual I applaud those of you out there that streamline processes this way.
A short while back, I was working on a report in MS Access. I had been using a MS Graph 12.0 Chart to illustrate some of the detail. The Chart worked well up to a point. Eventually, I had to incorporate information into the Chart in a way the Chart object did not support.
I knew what I needed to draw, and how to draw it; so, I embedded a MS PowerPoint Slide object into the report and added a script to the OnFormat Event. The script clears any unwanted graphics from the slide, loops through some recordsets, adds shapes, and formatting properties. The result is a small data generated metagraphic.


The portion of the image on the left is the slide. The blurred portion on the right is another portion of the MS Access report.
If you ever find yourself needing a drawing canvas in another MS Office application, consider the often overlooked MS PowerPoint.

My Take on the Immediate Window

The Immediate Window in the Microsoft Visual Basic Interface is a very handy thing indeed. But most of the documentation for the Immediate Window only covers how to make use of it in Debug Mode.
Lately, I've been using it to peek and poke at the inner workings of my files. There are times I like to have very precise control of element positioning; and, the application's interface only lets me eyeball it with the mouse. There are times I need to do things that the interface doesn't offer. For example: try filling a cell in MS Excel (2007) with a 3 stop asymmetrical gradient. The Immediate Window is your command line interface.
To see what I'm talking about, try this:

• Launch MS Excel.
• Launch the Visual Basic editor.
• In the Immediate Window, enter the following:

?Selection.Address

• The value of the Address property will be returned.

$A$1

This is a quick way to find the value of a property once, when you don't need to watch it change over time.
Granted our example is pretty insipid. But, what if you wanted to find the Left property of a Chart's PlotArea?

?ActiveChart.PlotArea.Left

Now that you know how many points the PlotArea is from the ChartArea's Left, you can set it to some other value.

ActiveChart.PlotArea.Left=36

If you are unsure where to start you can always type:

Application.

IntelliSense will offer some help after that.