Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript:
MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition

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April, 2007
Page 93

     set theSlide to make new slide at end of thePres¬

          with properties {layout:slide layout text slide}

end tell

We open the presentation and then set our variable to active presentation – the presentation in the front. The open command always opens the file in the front of the application, so this always works, if the presentation was not already open. If the presentation already is open, however, it does not come to the front, and you will be acting on the wrong presentation. So here's the full workaround you need:

tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"

     try

          set thePres to presentation "Saved Pres.ppt"

     on error

          open "Mac HD:Users:yourname:Desktop:Saved Pres.ppt"

          set thePres to active presentation

     end try

     set theSlide to make new slide at end of thePres ¬

          with properties {layout:slide layout text slide}

end tell

When Office 2008 arrives, do check in the Microsoft PowerPoint Suite to see if there is an 'open presentation' or similarly named command that returns a result, and also check open in the Standard Suite just in case, as well.

Make a New Slide

This turns out to be quite interesting. The Add method for Slides in VBA requires two arguments: Layout and Index:

ActivePresentation.Slides.Add Index:=1, Layout:=ppLayoutText

Now in AppleScript, there are not many properties of slide that are read/write (and some, like color scheme, require a special proprietary command to change them, so can't be set at inception when making a new slide). layout can be set, but slide index (the AppleScript term for Index) cannot – it's read-only and can't be set, not even at inception as read-only properties sometimes can. There is, however, a proper, bona fide AppleScript way of specifying where an element is inserted, and that's precisely what the developers have done here, to their credit. I have shown many times in these articles that elements are made at an object, and usually that's all you need to do. (See all the previous examples in Word and Excel). But if you try:

tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"

     set newSlide to make new slide at active presentation ¬

          with properties {layout:slide layout text slide}

end tell 

hoping that will work, it doesn't: it errors.

If you take a good look at the make command in the Standard Suite of any application, you'll see it has two required parameters: new (rather redundant since it's obligatory, but technically it's this new argument that specifies the class of the new element) and at. Well, you knew that already. But the description for the at parameter says "location reference : the location at which to insert the element". Now, strictly speaking, that really requires a precise location, not just "at" the parent object. Since in some cases it doesn't really matter where, and in other cases there's no choice where new elements go – they go at the end, after existing elements – most applications have implemented a convenient coercion that lets you omit the "at end of [object]". But with the slides of a presentation, we really want to be able to insert them anywhere, not just at the end, and we can!

The proper ways in AppleScript of indicating an insertion location are: at beginning of, at end of, at before [some element], at after [some element]. And all those work:

tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"

     set newSlideA to make new slide at beginning of active presentation ¬