Archive for November 14, 2007

Problem: You are giving a powerpoint presentation, and during this presentation you need to show/browse a website. The solution that most of the persons will chose will be to hit “alt+tab” to switch the focus to their browser… Yes that does the trick… But you may want to show the website from your powerpoint to keep your audience captivated. I personally think that people has a tendency to get distracted when you switch away from your fullscreen powerpoint.


My solution is to integrate a “Microsoft Web browser” component on your slide, so you can use it to browse a website. Start by adding the component as shown in this screen shot.





Then you can put several buttons on your slide to control your embedded browser. It should look like on this screenshot.


Finally you will have to add some Visual Basic code to your button’s callbacks. Something like:

Private Sub FontDecrease_Click()
    Dim Z As Variant
    WebBrowser1.ExecWB OLECMDID_ZOOM, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER, Null, Z
 
    If Z > 0 Then
        Z = Z - 1
    Else
        Z = 0
    End If
    WebBrowser1.ExecWB OLECMDID_ZOOM, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER, Z, Null
End Sub
 
Private Sub FontIncrease_Click()
    Dim Z As Variant
    WebBrowser1.ExecWB OLECMDID_ZOOM, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER, Null, Z
 
    If Z < 4 Then
        Z = Z + 1
    Else
        Z = 4
    End If
    WebBrowser1.ExecWB OLECMDID_ZOOM, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER, Z, Null
End Sub
 
Private Sub StartDemo_Click()
    WebBrowser1.Navigate ("http://samuel.happycoders.org/")
End Sub
 

Download this code: test-www-ppt.pas

And here is the result:


Download the example

In the next post I will explain why I wanted to do that… I have a really geeky reason