I want a clean way of stopping my looping powerpoint presentation

1. Yes
2. You can assign a VBA macro to any button or non-active control shape on a slide and within that macro event you could inform Access that the slide show has ended.

Thanks, Jamie. The slides in the presentation are loaded into a collection in ms access and then they are displayed in an unbound object on an access form. I think the connection to ppt has been closed just after the collection is loaded. So I guess your suggestion would work if that connection was still open and the click event got picked up in the ppt event module. But even in that case, the access presentation would still be running. How would I interrupt it or set some global in the access vba? If I could do that, each time through a slide, I could check to see if the global value was set to something.

Hi Steven. Do you have any code snippet you can share, particularly relating to the part "displayed in an unbound object on an access form" as I'm not sure what that means? If they slides are being displayed, then that must mean the PowerPoint object instance is loaded in memory and hence event trapping should be possible. For global access to a flag, you could use the SaveSetting and GetSetting methods to pass data between the two apps.

Hi Jamie. Not really any code related to the unbound object frame. Just code for dealing with the buttons on the access form which appear to the left of the unbound object frame. I recorded audio files for each of my slides and when I run the slide show I just start at the first slide in the collection and play the associated audio file using the sync option so that the code pauses while the audio file plays. When the audio file finishes, the code resumes, I bump up to the next slide and play its related audio file. I was using the buttons to advance the slide show but I'm going to change that to automatically bump to the next slide when the audio file finishes. I will enable the buttons between slides and leave them enabled for 5 seconds using a delay timer and this will allow me to interrupt the show between the slides. I labeled my audio files "Slide_1_audio.wav", "Slide_2_audio.wave", etc. The slides play in the unbound frame because I inserted my pptx application into it.  I'm going to give you credit for the solution because of the information you shared about the interrupt being picked up in the instance. Thanks.

Hi again, Jamie.
Here's the code snippet you asked for.
a button on the access form loads the ppt slides to the collection.
Here's how the pptx is placed into the unbound frame.
Private Sub insertShow_Click()
On Error GoTo insertShow_Click_Error
   
    ' Open PowerPoint
    Dim strPowerPointFile As String
    Dim pptobj As PowerPoint.Application
    Set pptobj = New PowerPoint.Application
    pptobj.Visible = True
    pptobj.WindowState = ppWindowMinimized
   
    strPowerPointFile = CurrentProject.Path & "\yourpowerpoint.pptx"
   
    ' Fill a collection with all Slide IDs.
    With pptobj.Presentations.Open(strPowerPointFile)
        Set mcolSlideIDs = New Collection
        Dim ppSlide As PowerPoint.Slide
        For Each ppSlide In .Slides
            mcolSlideIDs.Add ppSlide.SlideID
        Next
        .Close
    End With
   
    ' Close PowerPoint
    pptobj.Quit
    Set pptobj = Nothing

Here's the code to actually use the unbound object frame.

' Make object frame visible and enable "navigation" buttons.
    pptFrame.Visible = True
    frstSlide.Enabled = True
    lastSlide.Enabled = True
    nextSlide.Enabled = True
    nextSlide.SetFocus
    insertShow.Enabled = False
    insertShow.Visible = False
    previousSlide.Enabled = True
    cmdStop.Visible = True
    cmdStop.Enabled = True
   
    ' Specify OLE Class, Type, SourceDoc, SourceItem and other properties.
    With pptFrame
        .Class = "Microsoft Powerpoint Slide"
        .OLETypeAllowed = acOLELinked
        .SourceDoc = strPowerPointFile
    End With
    SetSlide 1
   
    frstSlide.SetFocus
    insertShow.Enabled = False
   
    Exit Sub

insertShow_Click_Error:
    MsgBox Err.Number & " " & Err.Description
    Exit Sub
End Sub

I guess you just need to have a boolean variable that stops the adding of the slides...and closing the powerpoint...if you could post a small sample maybe we could help more.

I put in a delay of 2 seconds between slides which let me click an exit button