I have a presentation used for our new employee orientation that lists when specific forms are due. For example, Health Insurance form must be turned in 60 days from hire date. I would like the date to automatically update to be 60 days from the current date each time the presentation is ran.
I currently have a text box linked to an Excel spreadsheet which has a formula =NOW()+60. This works great, but it still does not update unless you first double click on the text box to activate/open the Excel spreadsheet, which then refreshes to the current date and updates the correct future date.
This is not a workable solution however because in the first place there are about 6 different instances (embedded in over 100 slides) of these future dates that need to be double clicked and updated, and in the second place, I am not running the presentation myself, but instead a subject matter expert is, who is NOT technically savvy enough to even double-click text boxes to force a refresh.
I am hoping find code that would either insert a future date automatically directly into the PowerPoint text box -or- open and refresh the linked Excel objects each time the PowerPoint is opened.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
If you have to doubleclick to get the formula to refresh, it seems likely that the spreadsheet is embedded, not linked. If you link the info instead, you'd only need to open the Excel file and save again to force the date to change, then open the PPT, which'd see the updated Excel file and update the links.
PPT will open/close Excel once per link; if you have lots of links, this can be quite time-consuming, but for six instances, I doubt it'd be bad.
This could also be done in code, but then you'd need to turn it the code into an add-in and install it on the end-user's PC to give them a one-click solution. If they can't be trusted to doubleclick the dates to update them, I'm not sure you'd want to teach them how to run macros embedded in the presentation itself. If creating an add-in is a possibility, give a shout and I'll make a couple suggestions on how you could do the coding.