Question

Powerpoint font changes size for no obvious reason

Asked by: crescendo

I am creating Powerpoint slides from an Access database. The slides contains hymn words to be projected at church. I set the placeholder textframes up, add the words, then set the font characteristics, all from Access VBA. It usually works perfectly, but on one song ("Hark! The herald angels sing) the slides for the first two verses come out at font size 28, rather than the 32 I am setting programatically. The third verse is OK. It seems to be something to do with length of the verse (11 lines including blank line and chorus) because it works fine if I reduce it to 8 lines. However, if I manually edit the slide back to size 32, there is plenty of space for the words, no overflow, in fact there's space for another couple of lines.

The default font size is 32, and I set it again after I have added the text, so I can't understand why it comes out at 28. Any ideas?

' Add lyrics
            With oSlide.Shapes.Placeholders(1).TextFrame
                .TextRange = sSlideText
            End With
            
            ' Format the lyrics
            With oSlide.Shapes.Placeholders(1).TextFrame.TextRange
                .Font.Name = LyricFontName
                .Font.Size = LyricFontSize
                .Font.Bold = LyricFontBold
                .Font.Italic = LyricFontItalic
                .Font.Shadow = LyricFontShadow
                .Font.Color = LyricFontColor
                .ParagraphFormat.LineRuleWithin = msoTrue
                .ParagraphFormat.SpaceWithin = LyricLineSpacing
            End With

                                  
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Asked On
2008-12-16 at 11:22:12ID23989534
Tags

VBA Powerpoint Font

Topic

Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation Software

Participating Experts
1
Points
300
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: Echo_SPosted on 2008-12-16 at 18:29:33ID: 23190287

PPT's autofit text setting is kicking in because the text is longer than what will fit in the textbox, even if it's just longer by a little and will still fit on the slide. Unfortunately, I'm not a coder, so I can't tell you how to turn that off. Maybe it will give you a start in the right direction, though.

 

by: crescendoPosted on 2008-12-17 at 06:10:36ID: 23193310

Thanks for the comment. It pointed me in the right direction. It seems that the autofit property can't be set on an individual basis for placeholders, slides or even presentations. You have to go into Tools, Auto-Correct options, and select the AutoFormat As You Type tab. There are two checkboxes for autofit, but selecting/deselecting these affects all presentations; it is an application-wide setting. They can't be set directly from VBA, they are registry settings. Of course, you can edit the registry from VBA, but that opens up a whole can of worms.

 

by: Echo_SPosted on 2008-12-17 at 06:31:45ID: 23193529

Wow. I knew those were application-specific settings (had that conversation a couple of days ago, as a matter of fact), but I didn't think they wouldn't be accessible via VBA for a particular file -- unless you want to go into the registry. Yikes.

In PPT 2007, you can right-click the textbox, choose Format Shape, and select "do not autofit" on the Text Box tab. (These are, of course, the manual settings! :-) ) to override the autofit default. I think this same setting is available in 2003 on right-click Format Shape or right-click Format (on the menu) | Format Shape (or textbox or object or what have you) | Textbox tab.

 

by: crescendoPosted on 2008-12-17 at 06:40:40ID: 23193616

Yes, in 2003 you can right-click a shape and set its format, but the option is to adjust the shape to fit the text, not the other way round. So I could set this and let the shape grow, but then it would potentially mess up the shape below on the slide. Strangely, this property CAN be set in VBA, and so I disable it. It just seems weird that you can't easily control the font size in the same way.

One little tip: I had a newline character on the end of my text, and this was making the text longer with a blank line. I removed the newline programatically before adding the text to the shape and this particular piece of text fitted. But it's still irritating that you don't have proper control over what happens!

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