maxonthegit/ppsplit

A PowerPoint add-in that splits slides according to slideshow-time animation effects

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   |_|    |_|   |___/ .__/|_|_|  |_|
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                    |_|  by Massimo Rimondini

PPspliT is a PowerPoint add-in that transforms each slide of a presentation into a sequence of slides, each displaying the contents of the original slide as they would appear at every intermediate animation step. As such, its most natural context of application is to produce a redistributable version of a presentation in a flat file format like PDF.

To some extent, PowerPoint already provides export functions that are meant to include animations in the target file (e.g., it can export a presentation as a video). However, to my knowledge, a true conversion of existing slides into an equivalent sequence of static (i.e., animation-less) slides that is suitable for printing or PDF export has never been natively offered by PowerPoint. PPspliT tries to fill this gap.

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• Features
• Usage
• Building
  • Prerequisites
  • Packaging for Windows
  • Packaging for MacOS
• Known limitations
• Manual installation
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Troubleshooting

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Features

• User experience
  • Fully integrated with PowerPoint: it is natively implemented in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
  • Adds a new tab in PowerPoint's native ribbon toolbar (or dedicated toolbar for PowerPoint releases prior to 2007): splitting slides is a one-click task.
  • Can operate on a range of selected slides or on the whole presentation, if no slides are selected.
• Capabilities
  • Supports all entry, emphasis, exit and motion path effects applied to slide shapes (with some caveats, see below).
  • Supports "Rewind when done playing", "Hide on next mouse click" and "Auto-reverse" effect flags, as well as reversed motion paths.
  • Can split slides at every click-triggered animation effect (like it would happen during a slideshow) or at each and every animation effect (useful to preserve multiple intermediate animations that are played without any speaker interaction).
  • Updates custom slideshows by replacing each slide with those that result from splitting it. Custom slideshows are actually named sequences of slides from the full deck and, besides being used at presentation time, they can also be selected as predefined slide ranges when printing. Therefore, this feature can be exploited to conveniently export (by printing to PDF) slide subsequences that are predefined in the form of custom slideshows.
  • Can optionally preserve slide numbers during splitting: if slide footers contain text frames with dynamically computed slide numbers, these can be overwritten so that numbers in all the slides resulting from splitting a single original slide match its original slide number.
  • Operates with native PowerPoint shapes: the slides produced after the split are derived from the original presentation and still contain editable shapes.
  • Format-agnostic: since the final product is still a slide deck, you can export it to any document format for which you have a virtual printer or file converter installed. PDF is implicitly supported, as PowerPoint has been including an export function to this format for a few years now.

Some examples displaying the operation of the add-in can be found in the project home page.

Usage

Simply click on the "Split animations" button of the PPspliT toolbar. Using the appropriate checkboxes on the same toolbar, you can choose to split slides on animation effects that are triggered by a mouse click (most common usage) or just every animation effect (this may be especially slow). You can also choose to preserve slide numbers during the split.

Usage instructions are also available.

Notice: in all releases older than 2.0 the add-in makes heavy use of the system clipboard. Therefore, it is very important that you refrain from using it during the split and that no programs interfere with the clipboard at all. Effective since release 2.0, this requirement has been relaxed, and the system clipboard can be safely used while a slide deck is being split.

Warning: running the add-in will modify your presentation. Even though it is generally possible to revert the changes using the undo feature (Ctrl+Z), it is strongly advised to work on a copy of the original slide deck to avoid losing your work by accidentally overwriting it with the split presentation.

It may take a while for the split process to complete. If you are wondering

1. why so much code and
2. why does it take so long to split animations

here are some hints:

• PowerPoint applies slideshow effects to rasterized versions of the shapes. Instead, in PPspliT the same effects are re-implemented on the original shape objects.
• VBA has some sparse bugs here and there, which allow limited or no access to shape properties. I needed to work these around to my best.
• Each animation step requires creating a new slide, which is time consuming.
• For each animation step, all the shapes that are supposed to appear later on by means of a subsequent entry effect or to have disappeared because of a preceding exit effect must be appropriately removed.

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Building

As PPspliT is implemented as a VBA macro inside PowerPoint, there is no true build procedure. The source code is embedded in PowerPoint binary files that are saved as native PowerPoint add-ins: this is also the reason why changes are tracked in separate files (e.g., PPspliT.bas).
The only step that requires building is the generation of distributable installers.

Prerequisites

• Windows
  • Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS)
  • Office 2007 Custom UI editor -- As of June 2020, the link seems broken: you may try using the Office RibbonX Editor instead.
• MacOS
  • Script Editor (ships natively with MacOS)

Packaging for Windows

• Edit the VBA macro inside PPT12+\PPspliT.pptm as needed, then prepare the file as follows:
  • Update the release number if required (also in the about dialog box).
  • Save the file (PPspliT.pptm).
  • Export each module from the Visual Basic for Applications editor into corresponding .bas, .frm and .frx files.
  • Export the whole file as a PowerPoint add-in (PPspliT.ppam).
  • Open PPspliT.pptm using the Office 2007 Custom UI Editor or the Office RibbonX Editor, update the release number if required, and save the file.
  • Do the same for PPspliT.ppam.
• Apply consistent changes to file PPT11-\PPspliT.ppt, save it, export each module and export the whole PPT file as a PowerPoint 97-2003 add-in (PPspliT.ppa).
• Edit file ppsplit_installer.nsi to refresh the release number if required.
• Process file ppsplit_installer.nsi through NSIS (usually it is enough to right-click on the file and select "Compile NSIS script"). File PPspliT-setup.exe should then be generated in the parent folder.

Packaging for MacOS

• Apply changes to PPspliT.pptm and export it as PowerPoint add-in PPspliT.ppam as described above for the Windows case.
• Open file MacOS/PPspliT for MacOS/Install PPspliT.app using Apple's Script Editor.
• Refresh resource PPspliT.ppam inside the script by dragging and dropping the updated PPspliT.ppam inside the Script Editor.
• Save the installer and close the Script Editor.
• Open a Terminal window and run script MacOS/PPspliT for MacOS/build_macos_dmg.sh to generate file PPspliT.dmg.

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Known limitations

Yes, the list is apparently long, but please look carefully through it because it consists mostly of corner cases.

• PPspliT does not offer any PDF conversion functions: it is not meant to. It just processes a presentation to split animations, then it is up to your favorite PDF generation software or PowerPoint's native PDF export function to generate the final PDF (or whatever other document format).
• PPspliT does not preserve animation effects: the slide deck resulting from a split accurately renders the status of the slideshow at each intermediate animation step, but every slide is cleared of all animation effects. This means that you cannot have "moving shapes" in your final flat (PDF) document. Even if animations were preserved in the slides, embedding them in the final document would require advanced processing functions for every possible output document format, which is out of the scope of PPspliT, and would lead to much less portable documents.
• All of the add-in features are implemented for all PowerPoint versions, but minor glitches may exist with versions prior to 2007, sometimes due to VBA limits or bugs.
• Some functions are knowingly unsupported and may never be implemented:

1. Slide transitions — Since they are meant to smoothen slide changes, they have no persistent effects on their contents, hence no action that needs to be rendered by PPspliT.

2. Shape dimming after playing an effect

3. Most effects/actions triggered by mouse clicks on a specific shape — As an exception, cross-slide hyperlinks are supported: their targets are updated to point to the originally meant slides even after they have been renumbered by the split. Slide previews using the zoom feature are not supported anyway, meaning that they may become broken after splitting.

4. The shaking and blinking emphasis effects — This is due to a PowerPoint bug.

5. Effects applied to individual shapes of composite objects (SmartArt, charts) — To my knowledge, the interface exposed by VBA to alter the properties of such shapes is somewhat limited. For example, a position property like Selection.ShapeRange(1).SmartArt.Nodes(1).Shapes(1).Left is read-only, and methods like ScaleHeight or Cut affect the whole SmartArt object despite being applied to its individual shapes. Shape groups are of course supported.

6. For emphasis effects, repetition and "Until next click" duration — The duration parameter of emphasis effects normally indicates the time that it takes to play the effect until its end. For very few effect types, this same setting indicates the time for which the effect persists on its target shape instead. Effects that are not persistent (i.e., they have an established duration in seconds) are simply ignored by PPspliT. Any other emphasis effects are assumed to last until the end of the slide (or until a subsequent effect is applied to the same slide). This means that emphasis effects that last "until next click" are not supported and are handled in the same way as effects that last "until end of slide". On the other hand, the repeat setting allows to loop the effect's action for an established number of iterations or, alternatively, until the next mouse click or the end of the current slide. Since effect loops don't have any meaningful outcome on a statically rendered slide, PPspliT simply ignores this setting and assumes that all emphasis effects are applied once (i.e., without loops).

7. Accurate rendering of color effects — PowerPoint implements color change effects in a way that is honestly hard for me to reverse engineer. PPspliT approximates these effects but the final applied color may not perfectly coincide with the one natively applied by PowerPoint.

8. Many emphasis and motion effects that apply to a single text paragraph instead of a whole shape — In general, all those effects whose rendering requires separation of the text frame from its parent shape are unlikely to be supported.

9. Rasterized shape scaling and non-proportional text resizing — PowerPoint applies any effects to rasterized versions of the shapes. As a consequence, grow/shrink effects affect all the elements of a shape (including, e.g., shape border thickness) and not necessarily preserve the aspect ratio. PPspliT resizes the native shape instead, thus preserving its components (including border thickness) and resulting in a sharper rendering, because the native vector shapes are preserved and there is no interpolation introduced by resizing or rotation effects. While this is generally welcome, the final result may sometimes differ from the intended one. Most evidently, PPspliT only supports proportional growing/shrinking of text elements: if a grow/shrink effect occurs on a text element and is set to only affect it vertically or horizontally, PPspliT renders it by adjusting the font size by an amount that is a good compromise between horizontal and vertical growth/shrink, but no "compression" or "expansion" of the text occurs.

10. Accurate rendering of some rotation effects — When a slide show is played, PowerPoint rotates shapes around the center of the visible shape body. Instead, PPspliT rotates them around the center of the container box. Sometimes the container box may be larger than the visible shape, resulting in a different center of rotation being applied. To explain the difference, consider an arc, whose container box is the rectangle (or, possibly, square) that encloses the full circle: at slideshow time PowerPoint can rotate the arc around the center of the arc stroke itself, whereas PPspliT would rotate it around the center of the container box: since the latter is generally (much) larger than the visible arc, the final impression is that the visible shape (the arc) has "wandered around".

11. Exit/entry effects applied to shapes that are part of a slide layout are only partially supported — In fact, these shapes are turned into placeholders (instead of disappearing altogether) when one attempts to delete them. While this is not an issue in the vast majority of cases, if such placeholders have a formatting applied (e.g., a background color) they may stay visible even when they are not expected to.

12. Adjustment of slide numbers on a PPTX file that is imported into PowerPoint <=2003 using the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack — This is a very old special condition and is never expected to occur.

13. Adjustment of (dynamic) slide numbers that appear in standard text boxes — Although dynamically updated slide numbers can be inserted in any text paragraph, PPspliT is only able to adjust them (i.e., preserve a numbering that is coherent with the one of the original slides even after splitting) if such numbers appear in special placeholder boxes defined in slide masters and inserted as headers/footers in the slide deck.

14. Animations in slide masters

15. Animation effects whose order is strictly dependent on timing — Animation effects can be played after a mouse click ("on click"), after the preceding effect has ended ("after previous") or at the same time as a preceding effect ("with previous"). While ordering of the effect outcomes is strictly defined in the first two cases, it may depend on timing in the third case. For example, if effect B follows effect A in the animation sequence, both effects are set to play "with previous" but effect A has a delay set to 1 second whereas effect B has no delay, effect B is played before effect A. PPspliT does not consider this kind of reordering, and assumes that effects are always played in the same order in which they appear in the animation sequence.

16. Something else I am not aware of

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Manual Installation

PPspliT comes packaged with an installer which eases setup by means of a convenient wizard. The installer is tuned to operate in many different typical configurations (as a sole exception, security features in recent releases of macOS may require following specific (un)installation instructions). However, in the unlikely case in which it fails, you can still attempt a manual installation by following the procedure below.

1. Download the latest PPspliT macro file and save it to a location of your choice. As an alternative, download the latest Windows installer file (even if you are using macOS), open it with your favorite Zip unpacker (do not start the installer), find file PPspliT.ppam inside the archive and save it to a location of your choice.

2. Start PowerPoint.

3. Add the downloaded PPspliT.ppam as a PowerPoint add in as described at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-or-load-a-powerpoint-add-in-3de8bbc2-2481-457a-8841-7334cd5b455f, namely:

• In case you are using PowerPoint for Windows:

4. Click the File tab, then Options.
5. In the Options dialog box, click Add-Ins.
6. In the Manage list at the bottom of the dialog box, click PowerPoint Add-ins, then click Go.
7. In the Add-Ins dialog box, click Add New.
8. In the Add New PowerPoint Add-In dialog box, browse for the previously saved PPspliT.ppam file and then click OK.
9. A security notice might appear. In this case, click on Enable Macros and then click Close.

• If, instead, you are using PowerPoint for macOS:

4. Open the Tools menu on the top bar (i.e. not the PowerPoint ribbon toolbar, but rather the macOS menu bar at the top of the screen) and select PowerPoint add ins.
5. Click on + and select file PPspliT.ppam that you saved above.

Note that,even when this issue occurs, the installer should have already taken care of copying the required files to a proper location in your system (usually %APPDATA%\Microsoft\AddIns\PPspliT for Windows systems, and $HOME/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office for macOS systems). Therefore, the steps for unpacking and saving file PPspliT.ppam described above can be skipped.

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References

• Project home page
• At the time of first sketching the add-in code, I used this blog post by Neil Mitchell and its follow-up as greatly inspirational starting points.

Acknowledgments

Although I am the only developer of the add-in, several suggestions for improvements and bug fixes came in the form of feedback from its end users. Some of them are acknowledged in the changelog.

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Troubleshooting

The add-in is splitting only the first slide instead of the whole slide deck.

Maybe you have accidentally selected the first slide in the left-side thumbnail pane of PowerPoint. Just try clicking anywhere in the main pane of PowerPoint (i.e., the slide editor) and try PPspliTting again.

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The (Windows) installer fails to recognize any PowerPoint releases (error message "the add in has been left unconfigured").

This may happen, for example, when a pre installed OEM PowerPoint release is being used. There is not much that can be done to address this issue, as specially packed PowerPoint releases may be harder to detect for the installer and the effort to improve its recognition capabilities exceeds the user reported impact of this problem. However, you can still work around this little problem by performing a manual installation.

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Error "Macro cannot be found or has been disabled because of security" is displayed every time a split is attempted.

As an outdated but, possibly, still valid explanation, a security update released by Microsoft around April 2012 may cause this issue with most VBA-based applications that make use of dialog boxes, including PPspliT. To correct this problem, Microsoft suggests deleting cached versions of control type libraries, which is harmless for your system. I can confirm that this solution has worked for me. Basically, you have to delete all .exd files stored in %HOMEPATH%\Application Data\Microsoft\Forms and %TEMP%\VBE. Please rely on the official instructions from Microsoft, which can be found in the page mentioned above.
If this does not solve your problem, then either you are still using a really outdated PPspliT release (1.5 was known to have such compatibility problems) or your macro security settings may need to be reviewed.

ppsplit's Issues

Bullet point indentation levels larger than 5 cause PPspliT to fail

PPSpliT version 1.27
Tested with Office 2021 / Office 2019

Inspecting the the stage at which the animation splitting fails, it seems to always stop just before bullet points with a certain amount of indentation. Unindenting them by one removes the error, so it seems that PPSpliT can't deal with indentation level of 6 or larger.

No issues

No issues at all. Just came here to say thank you so much for this add-on. Worked flawlessly with Powerpoint on MacOS and saved me so much hassle! Cheers

MacOS: Flattening an equation with animations does not work

I have several equations revealed through animations. When I flatten this slide, the resulting slides are all wrong and have extra equation characters everywhere

Windows installer fails to detect OEM PowerPoint release (Win10, PPT2019)

Hello, unfortunately, when I try to install the package, I get the following error:

Failed to automatically detect any Office releases. The add-in has been left unconfigured.

I am running PP2019 on Win10. Feel free to ask if you need more information, or if I can somehow contribute to the project

Paolo

Emphasis effects that change fill colors cause PPspliT to fail when scheme colors are used as target colors

This slide ch4-slides-planar-coloring.zip has a sequence of color changes to circles. It causes this error with PPsplit 1.21:

PPspliT 1.27 error: method "copy" of object "TextRange" failed

This is when I run PPspliT 1.27 (also happens with version 1.24) on this file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xhuoeb7jyjuienm/example.pptm?dl=0

It's a fairly minimal example, just one slide with two animations that are just fade-ins.

Interestingly, the error goes away if I change the Fade animation to Appear. Then, even if I change back to Fade, the error is still prevented. So I'm not sure what is set in this particular version of the presentation that is causing the error.

Animations not splitting on SmartArt

Hi,

I've been trying to split a PPTX that has smart art animations in them, but for an n stage animation I simply get n pages will the full smart art on it. Here's the instructions for a MWE:

PowerPoint version: Microsoft® PowerPoint® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2405 Build 16.0.17628.20006) 64-bit
PPSpliT version: 2.6

1. Create a blank slideshow
2. Add a smartart (e.g. a list):
   
3. Set animation on smartart (e.g. to "appear") and set to one-by-one in advanced effects
   
4. Run PPSpliT and observe result
   

Is anyone else able to recreate this? Thanks!

Slide numbers fail to be preserved

I am having a problem with PPspliT (currently running 2.6). It does split the animated sides correctly, but assigns consecutive page numbers to each animation slide rather than maintaining the same slide number. I have been using PPslIT for some time and it worked properly. This problem exists in the older version 1.24, and after I upgraded to 2.6 and happens on both MacOS (Ventura) and on Windows versions of Powerpoint. I am not sure if a recent update of Powerpoint broke things or whatever, but it is an issue.

By the way, I have tried both Preserve slide numbers and Preserve slide numbers and add a subindex and it is the same problem.

==Tamer

Clipboard-related errors while splitting

Dear Max,

Thanks a lot for this plugin! Unfortunately, I frequently get "Method 'Copy' of object 'TextRange' failed" errors, even when I am trying to split very simple slides like the test slide attached. I do not think that I have anything running that also accesses the clipboard, and am not sure how to troubleshoot this. Would be grateful for any advice - sometimes, I can still get the add-in to produce helpful output by continuing anyway repeatedly, but it would be wonderful if we could get it to actually work.

All the best,

Lukas
Dummy.pptx

Index OOB Error

I've encountered an Index OOB error while splitting some lecture slides. The issues seems to be animations imported from an older powerpoint version where an empty line was given an animation. I've attached an example below.

The solution was to simply remove the animations on the empty lines, but perhaps there's a way to detect this and skip it, or display a more informative error message.

Thanks!

PPspliT version: v2.2
PP version: PowerPoint for Mac v16.68
System version: macOS Monterey 12.6.1

Fatal Error

Unfortunately, an unrecoverable error has occurred while splitting.

- Error code: -2147024809

- Error description: The index into the specified collection is out of bounds.

- Slide number:  2 (original) -  2 (actual)

Would you like to continue anyway (discouraged)?

example.pptx

Splitting slides with emojis does not work properly

Hi! I noticed that splitting slides where bullet points with animations have emojis doesn't work properly. The emojis seem to be ignored, and all emojis are included in every stage of the split. I've attached a minimal example of this behaviour and some screenshots below.
Split Example (After).pptx
Split Example (Before).pptx

This...

Is split like this...

feature request: automatically export PDF and undo animation splitting

I love ppsplit and am very grateful for it. What I describe below is a minor issue, but it would be nice to have.

When I use ppsplit, I first save my document, execute ppsplit, then select File-->Export-->Create PDF/XPS Document, then I close the PPT file and tell it not to save (so that the original file before the splitting is preserved).

It would be great if ppsplit could automate some of that. The most ideal scenario is this. When you click the ppsplit button, it

1. creates a new document that is a copy of the current.
2. splits animations across slides in the new document.
3. selects File-->Export-->Create PDF/XPS Document. Some user interaction probably is necessary here to select the filename and confirm overwriting an existing PDF file with the same name (but if this could also be automated, that would be ideal).
4. removes the new document. (also may not be possible)

The reason I suggest to create a new document is to reduce the chance that I accidentally save the split document. I've done this before, and only because I was using Dropbox was I able to recover the original, unsplit document. It would be a disaster if I didn't have a backup of the unsplit document, especially if I accidentally closed the document and lost the Undo history.

The other reason is that it would be nice if, to continue editing the document after running ppsplit, I didn't have to close Powerpoint (choosing not to save the split edits), then re-open. If ppsplit makes a new document, then the original can stay open and I can go back to editing it right away, instead of having to re-open it from disk.

An alternative to creating a new document first is, after exporting to PDF, to undo all the edits. But this could take some time, so creating a new document seems like the most straightforward way to preserve the original.

Bug: PPspliT is not breaking up animations, rather just copying each slide (with animations in tact)

I'm on mac Big Sur running powerpoint version 16.77.1.
When I try to use PPspliT on my presentation, rather than splitting each slide into multiple where each has it's own step of the animation, it instead just copied each slide n times where n is the number of animations appearing on the slide.

Loading the plugin fails on Microsoft 365 PowerPoint (Version 2302 Build 16.0.16130.20298) 64 Bit

I've successfully installed the plugin, without any error messages.

When starting PowerPoint, it is not displayed on the ribbon.

When going through "Options" / "Add-ins" / "Manage PowerPoint add-ins", it is listed without a checkmark. When I try to enable it, this error message is shown:

Translation: "Unfortunately, PowerPoint was unable to load the add-in for some reason." (I'm not kidding you)

Build details:

Microsoft® PowerPoint® für Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2302 Build 16.0.16130.20298) 64 Bit

Old release (1.5) mentioned in README.md + Split failures in latest release (1.24)

Hi! First of all, thanks for all the work!
Question: both the code and the addin's ribbon say that the version number is 1.24. The readme.md however refers to version 1.5 as outdated. Is the publicly available addin the most updated one?

I ask because I've tried it on a simple animation and it fails. It doesn't use any of the techniques you list as causing it to fail. I get several errors like the one in the screenshot in a single slide. I can provide the PPT if it's useful for you.

Compile error prevents splitting altogether in PowerPoint 2007

Hi,
First of all, I want to thank you very much for your work. I used it a lot for my presentations as a student.
I have recommended it to many friends and colleagues and will continue to do so.

I have a little problem currently with PPsplit. I reinstalled it on my computer using your installer.
I have a 2007 version of power point on a Windows 8.1
The point is that even with a simple single slide with three lines each appearing with a click, an error message appears.
It said "Compile error in hidden module: PPsplit" and "Macro not found or has been disabled due to your security settings"
I did what you recommended in the Troubleshooting section and deleted all the .exd files. But that doesn't solve the problem.
I checked my macro settings and everything is on. I am using your version 1.22 of PPsplit.

To fix the problem, I used your PPT12 + PPsplit.pptm directly and reproduced the problem. When using the PPsplit_main macro in the Developer menu, I get the message: "Method member or data not found" for the "Private Sub assignColor" function.
So I checked which use of this function was problematic and it was that of "Private Sub copyFontAttributes" more precisely line 222 "assignColor f1.Color, f2.Color". In my example, the f1.Color and f2.Color values ​​are 0 (is this normal?). When I replaced line 222 with f1.Color = f2.Color, the error goes away and everything seems to be working fine.
Do you know why this happens?

I don't know if I explained correctly. I'm still new to development.
Thank you once again for your excellent work!

Text highlight colour not animated

I have an animation step where some text with (non-transparent) text highlight appears.

In the PPspliT-ed output (as of the v2 rewrite), while the text is transparent before the animation step, the text highlight is not. This means that before that PDF page, you see a block of text highlight colour.

Example (animated text with turquoise highlight colour):

Failed to detect any Office releases

Upon installing I receive this popup,

And after opening up powerpoint again, the extension isn't installed (as mentioned in the popup). I have an official windows/ office installation so I don't know what I am doing wrong?

Error while splitting

First of all, thank you for writing this plugin. I think it is very helpful and should be supported by PowerPoint natively.

When using your tool on the slides of a course I am teaching, I constantly keep getting a fatal error:

I have reduced the problem to a single slide, which a simple slide with text boxes, pictures and rectangles. Is any of those not supported by your plugin?
Cannot split.pptx

Note that if I let PPspliT continue, the resulting slides are correct and as I would expect (at least, I don't notice any problems).

In case shapes like rectangles are not (fully) supported, I would like to ask if it would be possible to add some kind of checkbox to "continue despite any errors" (for future errors as well). For my purposes, the split slides are perfectly fine. However, clicking on "continue" after every error is quite time consuming for a slide deck of 70 slides with many animations on each of them. I do see the error handling delays the slide processing a lot, but as long as it can be done automatic, that would be good enough.

Versions

PPspliT 1.21
PowerPoint from office 365 (Powerpoint 16)

Slides are assigned a transition effect after splitting

Thanks for your add-in, it works great.

This is a minor issue I encountered. Whenever I split a presentation, it seems the process adds transitions to the ppt file (specifically the Cut transition, which doesn't show any special effect when using PowerPoint). Then, somehow, it is later preserved when I save the file as pdf and show it in fullscreen, which appears like a checkerboard transition.

I haven't found any mention to it or any way to solve it. So far the only thing I can do is select all slides and change the transition setting to None. Which is not an important thing, but I have fogotten several times and found out when showing the presentation.

Any ideas? Thanks again.

PS: I'm using v1.23 and Office Professional Plus 2019.

No issue

No issue. Just meant to thank you, I find it beautiful when big companies like MS rely on the open source community to provide vital and obvious features.

PPSpliT 1.26 changes alternative text for pictures

Hello,
PPSpliT 1.26 when run using either PowerPoint 2013 and Windows 10 or PowerPoint 2019 and macOS 11.6 changes the alternative text for (some) pictures in a presentation. Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a slide with a JPG picture.
2. Add the alternative text for the picture.
3. Add an animation to the slide.
4. Execute the "Split animations" command.

Result: the alternative text for pictures changes to some number (in MWE below to " 5").
Expected result: the alternative text remains unaffected.

MWE: The attached presentation consists of two slides, each having a JPG picture and some simple animation. Run "Split animations" on this presentation and consult the alternative text (In PP2013 for Windows: Format picture -> Size & Properties -> Alt Text; in PP2019 for Mac: Right-click the picture -> Edit alt text).
W01 - ppsplit bug.pptx

While converting slide number, generate new number as slide-number.animation-number

Please keep an option so that while converting slide number, generate new number as .. For example, if slide 12 needs 3 clicks during the animation, it should generate the slide numbers as 12.1, 12.2 and 12.3

PPspliT 1.27 clipboard-related error (number -2147221040 - Method 'Copy' failed)

When working on splitting up a slideshow, I encountered this error pictured above. This ends up meaning CLIPBRD_E_FIRST.
Here is a screenshot of the slide that it occurs on and the animations on it

The timing is set to 0 seconds on the first group.
I have also had this happen on a few other slides in this presentation that had similar starts to the animations in the slide.