Read notes from a PowerPoint presentation?

Hi,

Does anyone know if it is possible to read speaker notes for each slide in powerpoint from Matlab and collect them as a string/text? If so, how can one achieve it? I am trying to use the actxserver but am lost.

Thanks,

Kapil

Answer 1

[Kautuk Raj]

As pointed out by you, actxserver function has to be used to read speaker notes for each slide in PowerPoint from MATLAB and collect them as a string/text. You can use the following steps:

Create an ActiveX object for PowerPoint using the actxserver function in MATLAB.

ppt = actxserver('PowerPoint.Application');

Open the PowerPoint presentation using the ppt.Presentations.Open method.

presentation = ppt.Presentations.Open('path/to/presentation.pptx');

Make sure to replace 'path/to/presentation.pptx' with the actual path to your PowerPoint presentation.

Loop through each slide in the presentation and extract the speaker notes using the Slide.NotesPage.Shapes.Placeholders.Item property.

notes = cell(1, presentation.Slides.Count);
for i = 1:presentation.Slides.Count
    notes{i} = presentation.Slides.Item(i).NotesPage.Shapes.Placeholders.Item(2).TextFrame.TextRange.Text;
end

Close the presentation and quit PowerPoint using the presentation.Close and ppt.Quit methods.

presentation.Close;
ppt.Quit;

Concatenate the speaker notes for all slides into a single string using the strjoin function.

allNotes = strjoin(notes);

This code creates a single string allNotes that concatenates the speaker notes for all slides in the presentation, using the strjoin function.