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

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April, 2007
Page 96

For now, as an alternative, to get the selected slide, this works, if you first click anywhere in the slide pane to make it the active pane:

tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"

     set theIndex to slide index of slide of view ¬

          of active window

     set selectedSlide to slide theIndex of active presentation

     set slideID to slide ID of selectedSlide

end tell

The slide of the view of the active window will be your selected slide as long as you are not in Slide Sorter View (which does not have any single slide displayed as a slide property), and as long as you first click somewhere in the Slide pane to make it the active pane if you are in Normal View. Or else switch to Slide View, where it always works. You'll need to dispense with naming the slide (since you can't) and use the slide ID instead.

If you are not going to be moving slide positions around, then just calling selectedSlide will find it later in the script. But to be safer, since that is a reference to the slide by index and the index may well change, get the slide ID now (as in the third line above) and then use it to find your slide later, just as we did in the previous section:

      set theSlide to item 1 of (get every slide of active presentation ¬

             whose slide ID is slideID)

But there doesn't seem to be any way to get the selected shape on a slide (unless it's the only shape, of course). While waiting for the next version to hopefully come up with a selection property, even do Visual Basic wouldn't at first appear to be much use since it cannot return a result to AppleScript.

Since this problem would put so many PowerPoint macros out of bounds I have come up with a workaround as a way to get past that first line of a macro that will otherwise convert nicely to AppleScript. I have made it as a handler (subroutine) called GetSelectedShape() because you are going to need it very frequently for now (PowerPoint 2004, that is), including in many other examples in this chapter. Just keep GetSelectedShape() handy in a script library, and paste it in to the bottom of every script that needs to work with a selected shape.

You call it by entering the line:

set selectedShape to my GetSelectedShape()

whenever you need it (for now, in PPT 2004), to take the place of any VBA line that gets the selected shape or assigns a variable to ActiveWindow.Selection.ShapeRange. Here it is in action:

tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"

     set selectedShape to my GetSelectedShape() --calls the handler below

     -- test only:

     set theText to (content of text range of text frame of selectedShape)

     -- enter rest of script after trying the test and removing the line above

end tell

to GetSelectedShape()

     set textFilePath to (path to temporary items as string) & "Shared Text File"

     tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"