liteWait PowerPoint to HTML Converter

• Download source files - 228 Kb
• Download demo project - 363 Kb

Introduction

This is a little app that I wrote for a client that has a number of PowerPoint presentations in their portal's document library. The problem with the presentations is that they are often fairly large especially for the users that were hitting the site through a 56k modem. The application scans a particular directory and it's subdirectories for Microsoft PowerPoint files (.ppt) and then uses the COM objects for PowerPoint to open the presentation and do a Save As HTML. We then modified the portal's document to have 2 links for each presentation, one that links to the PowerPoint file and one that links to the HTML version.

Form1.vb

This form initializes the app and is hidden right away only showing in the system tray. Further documentation is within the code.

SettingsForm.vb

This form is shown when the user right clicks the system tray icon and chooses Settings.... It will read the settings.xml file to populate the form. When the user modifies the entries it will then save the values back to the XML file. The settings are:

• Scan Directory - The directory that will be crawled for PowerPoint files.
• Scan Interval - The length of time in minutes between crawls.
• HTML Directory - Where the PowerPoint files that are converted to HTML will be saved.

Some cool things in the app besides the HTML conversion shows intermediate and beginner programmers how to use:

• the Timer control
• an XML file as a data store
• the NotifyIcon class
• a custom trace listener for debugging and logging

Please note that Microsoft PowerPoint needs to be on the server and open for the application to work.

History

26 Oct 2002 - updated downloads