Academic Company Events NI Developer Zone Support Solutions Products & Services Contact NI MyNI

Document Type: Tutorial
NI Supported: Yes
Publish Date: Sep 6, 2006

Using LabVIEW as an Automation Client with Microsoft PowerPoint

2 ratings | 2.50 out of 5
Print

Description

You can use LabVIEW to communicate with Microsoft PowerPoint via ActiveX automation with LabVIEW acting as the automation client and PowerPoint acting as the automation server. From LabVIEW, you can manipulate only the objects that PowerPoint exposes to other applications. This means that PowerPoint determines what it exposes and what values and variables must be passed to each property or method.

Manipulating PowerPoint via automation requires you to have knowledge of the PowerPoint object model as well as familiarity with performing ActiveX automation from LabVIEW. The best source of information about the PowerPoint Object Model is the PowerPoint Object Model Help file located on your Microsoft Office CD. For Office 97, this file is called Vbappt8.hlp. The Microsoft Object Model Guide details the organization of the objects in PowerPoint as well as Excel, Access, and Word. The basic procedure for using LabVIEW to communicate with PowerPoint is to open a reference to PowerPoint from LabVIEW, invoke methods and set/get properties, and then close the reference.

In LabVIEW 7.1 or earlier, refer to the ActiveX Support chapter of the LabVIEW User Manual (linked below) for more information about using LabVIEW with Microsoft PowerPoint. In LabVIEW 8.0 or later, refer to the Using ActiveX with LabVIEW topic in the LabVIEW Help (linked below).

Common Applications


Used to communicate with PowerPoint from LabVIEW in order to load a presentation or to run a slideslideshow programmatically. LabVIEW 6.x comes with an example that will prompt the user for a PowerPoint slide show presentation *.pps file and then launch PowerPoint. The example is located under LabVIEW folder \examples\comm\actxpp.llb
Related Links:
LabVIEW User Manual
LabVIEW Help: Using ActiveX with LabVIEW
2 ratings | 2.50 out of 5
Print

Reader Comments | Submit a comment »

 

Legal
This tutorial (this "tutorial") was developed by National Instruments ("NI"). Although technical support of this tutorial may be made available by National Instruments, the content in this tutorial may not be completely tested and verified, and NI does not guarantee its quality in any way or that NI will continue to support this content with each new revision of related products and drivers. THIS TUTORIAL IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND AND SUBJECT TO CERTAIN RESTRICTIONS AS MORE SPECIFICALLY SET FORTH IN NI.COM'S TERMS OF USE (http://ni.com/legal/termsofuse/unitedstates/us/).