Powerpoint and Excel Search

[Dave Mathias]

To anyone who can help:

I would like to create a page in PowerPoint which would enable a specific
search in an Excel document (not embedded).

What I want is:
I have an Excel spreadsheet with ALOT of Fault messages for a PLC program
which shows how to fix the fault condition. (example:
"AC1\alarm\fault_064")
In a Powerpoint presentation, I would like to create a field which asks the
operator to input the fault number to search.
After the operator inputs the fault number (example: "064") and presses
Search button, it will search within the external Excel document and
highlight the cell which contains "AC1\alarm\fault_064".
This will allow the operator to read the instructions on correcting the
fault.

Is this even possible?
If not, is there a program that can do this operation?

Thanks alot,
Dave

 

[PPTMagician]

You'll need coding. There's a PowerPoint Indexer here:
http://www.flounder.com/powerpoint_indexer.htm

I don't know if it'll index an embedded excel or not, but the author has
made the code available.

 

[Dave Mathias]

I thought of this.
The only problem is there is around 2000 faults, so would require this many
pages or slides.
Otherwise, this would be a great idea and easy to use for the operator. I
wish I was better at VBA coding....
Even if they use the find feature in PPT, I think I would need so many
slides it would take forever.

If you have any ideas, I would appreciate it.

Thanks alot!!
Dave

 

[Dave Mathias]

What is Merge? I am not familiar with this.

Where do I start if I wanted to write the VBA to create a presentation with
a slide for each fault?
I presume this would be alot faster to do in coding than manually creating
over 2000 slides... is that correct?

I would be very interested in seeing how you wrote that VBA code and the
results.

Thank you sir for all your continued support.

Dave

 

[Brian Reilly, MVP]

Dave,
There's another option to Steve's great ideas. He and I very close
friends for many years and still disagree on just about everything. I
can't believe he didn't mention adding tags through one our
co-authored addins "Starter Set Plus" I think he renamed it. it adds
tags to slides or shapes and let's you assign a Name of the tag and a
Value. There is sample code on my web site reillyand.com to Iterate a
search through all tags in a presentation that could be easily
modified to do what you want.

Many ways to get to the same place, just watch out for "One way
streets".

Brian Reilly, MVP