I am being driven to distraction by a PowerPoint problem. So I thought I'd document my attempts at solving it in case it can save time for anyone with a similar nightmare.
I have a MS Access database on a network and I use PowerPoint to diplay various statistics from the database on a large screen.
The PowerPoint display is controlled by macros that run morning and afternoon to gather the latest data to display.
All was running smoothly until I introduced an Excel graph onto one of the slides. Although the Access reports output as .snp snapshots were successfully updating on a daily basis, the Excel graph - despite being set to update links automatically - was not.
It seems after much searching, that the only way to get the graph to update was to load the PowerPoint .ppt file and update the links, then re-save to .pps format.
I didn't want my users to have to do all this manually every day particularly because there are two presentations - one for the morning and one for the afternoon. So I created a button in the Access database to load a control PowerPoint containing a single slide with an Action button. The button calls a macro that opens each presentation (.ppt files), updates the links and then saves them as show (.pps files).
Nice one! or so I thought. BUT when I loaded the control presentation as a show the action button didn't work. This was true whether I loaded it as a .pps file or loaded the .ppt with the /s command line switch.
Messy as it seemed, the best thing I could come up with was to load the .ppt, instruct the user to 'View Show' then click the button. It worked.
BUT! oh no, I hear you sigh. Not more buts.
I have now found that although the graph is updating nicely with this bit of daily manual intervention, the snapshot reports now run off the screen and the dates in the reports don't update, though we think the data does. I don't yet fully understand what's going on but it might be because my user who is doing the daily updating is using 2007 whereas the display screen is using 2003.
So, here I go again. Another problem to solve...
