Solved: Open With No Active Presentation

[Brandtrock]

When I launch Power Point I always get a blank presentation that I close out of. I have the presentations I want to work on in a folder on my PC. How do I get Powerpoint to open without a presentation at all?

The world won't come to an end if I have to close out the default presentation first, but it would be much less frustrating. Speaking of frustrating, the search I did in the MS help files was everything but helpful.

TIA,

[Jacob Hilderbrand]

You can just open the presentation you want by double clicking its icon.

[Killian]

How do I get Powerpoint to open without a presentation at all?

Short answer: you can't.
The file that you start with is opened from C:\WINDOWS\SHELLNEW\PWRPNTxx.POT (where xx is your Office version). What you can do, is edit this POT so your initial template is a little more appealing. You could rename one one your existing templates and overwrite this original so you start up with something useful to you but what you can't do is delete it... PowerPoint gets upset, tries to re-install and if you cancel this, bombs out with a fatal error. Strange but true...

[Brandtrock]

Short answer: you can't.
The file that you start with is opened from C:\WINDOWS\SHELLNEW\PWRPNTxx.POT (where xx is your Office version). What you can do, is edit this POT so your initial template is a little more appealing. You could rename one one your existing templates and overwrite this original so you start up with something useful to you but what you can't do is delete it... PowerPoint gets upset, tries to re-install and if you cancel this, bombs out with a fatal error. Strange but true...

Jake, thanks. The is in the details. I don't double click largely due to the fact that my anal retentive accounting background has made a folder structure with more level's than Dante's trip through hell. Handy in most cases, but not if I want to launch my PPT's.

Killian, thanks as well. At least now I know it isn't my lack of familiarity with PPT causing the problem; just another FEATURE that M$ has forced upon me. Oh well. I'll just do what I've been doing.

Thanks again for the replies.

[Killian]

What am I saying??? Everything's possible with VBA - it's just that sometimes it's insanely complicated

At first, I thought that all we had to do was create an AddIn that loops through the presentations collection and deletes unsaved ones in it's Auto_Open routine, but of course the addin loads BEFORE the blank pres is opened.
So instead, the auto_open code will have to initiate an event handling class, so paste this into a module: [VBA]Public cPPTObject As New cEventClass

Sub Auto_Open()
Set cPPTObject.PPTEvent = Application
End Sub[/VBA] Then add a class module called cEventClass and drop this in: [VBA]Public WithEvents PPTEvent As Application

Private Sub PPTEvent_AfterNewPresentation(ByVal pres As Presentation)

pres.Saved = msoTrue
pres.Close
Set cPPTObject.PPTEvent = Nothing

End Sub[/VBA]
When the addin loads, it enables events. We use the AfterNewPresentation event to close the new pres and the set the event object to nothing (otherwise opening a new blank pres would be impossible)
At that should do it... compile, save as addin, load the addin and you should never have to look at another blank presentation again (unless you're runnng 97, in which case it won't work at all)
Or just use this one...

[Brandtrock]

Nice work Killian!

You need to put it in the KB now.

Very cool!