    _____  _____           _ _ _______
   |  __ \|  __ \         | (_)__   __|
   | |__) | |__) |__ _ __ | |_   | |
   |  ___/|  ___/ __| '_ \| | |  | |
   | |    | |   \__ \ |_) | | |  | |
   |_|    |_|   |___/ .__/|_|_|  |_|
                    | |
                    |_|  by Massimo Rimondini

PPspliT is a PowerPoint add-in that transforms each slide of a presentation into a sequence of slides, each displaying the contents of the original slide as they would appear at every intermediate animation step. As such, its most natural context of application is to produce a redistributable version of a presentation in a flat file format like PDF.

To some extent, PowerPoint already provides export functions that are meant to include animations in the target file (e.g., it can export a presentation as a video). However, to my knowledge, a true conversion of existing slides into an equivalent sequence of static (i.e., animation-less) slides that is suitable for printing or PDF export has never been natively offered by PowerPoint. PPspliT tries to fill this gap.

Features
Usage
Building
Known limitations
References
Acknowledgments
Troubleshooting

Features

User experience
- Fully integrated with PowerPoint: it is natively implemented in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
- Adds a new tab in PowerPoint's native ribbon toolbar (or dedicated toolbar for PowerPoint releases prior to 2007): splitting slides is a one-click task.
- Can operate on a range of selected slides or on the whole presentation, if no slides are selected.
Capabilities
- Supports all entry, emphasis, exit and motion path effects applied to slide shapes (with some caveats, see below).
- Supports "Rewind when done playing", "Hide on next mouse click" and "Auto-reverse" effect flags, as well as reversed motion paths.
- Can split slides at every click-triggered animation effect (like it would happen during a slideshow) or at each and every animation effect (useful to preserve multiple intermediate animations that are played without any speaker interaction).
- Can optionally preserve slide numbers during splitting: if slide footers contain text frames with dynamically computed slide numbers, these can be overwritten so that numbers in all the slides resulting from splitting a single original slide match its original slide number.
- Operates with native PowerPoint shapes: the slides produced after the split are derived from the original presentation and still contain editable shapes.
- Format-agnostic: since the final product is still a slide deck, you can export it to any document format for which you have a virtual printer or file converter installed. PDF is implicitly supported, as PowerPoint has been including an export function to this format for a few years now.

Some examples displaying the operation of the add-in can be found in the project home page.

Usage

Simply click on the "Split animations" button of the PPspliT toolbar. Using the appropriate checkboxes on the same toolbar, you can choose to split slides on animation effects that are triggered by a mouse click (most common usage) or just every animation effect (this may be especially slow). You can also choose to preserve slide numbers during the split.

Usage instructions are also available.

Notice: the add-in makes heavy use of the system clipboard. Therefore, it is very important that you refrain from using it during the split and that no programs interfere with the clipboard at all.

Warning: running the add-in will modify your presentation. Even though it is generally possible to revert the changes using the undo feature (Ctrl+Z), it is strongly advised to work on a copy of the original slide deck to avoid losing your work by accidentally overwriting it with the split presentation.

It may take a while for the split process to complete. If you are wondering

why so much code and
why does it take so long to split animations

here are some hints:

PowerPoint applies slideshow effects to rasterized versions of the shapes. Instead, in PPspliT the same effects are re-implemented on the original shape objects.
VBA has some sparse bugs here and there, which allow limited or no access to shape properties. I needed to work these around to my best.
Effects on text frames are especially tricky to apply, because these frames may have the text auto-fit feature enabled. Paragraphs that have not appeared yet still need to consume room in the text box, or the auto-fit will adjust font size to fit just the visible text. I couldn't find an always-working way to retrieve the actual font size used by PowerPoint after auto-fitting, therefore this has been implemented with some workarounds.
Each animation step requires creating a new slide, which is time consuming.
Shape properties (e.g., depth, text attributes, etc.) must be matched between different slides. Part of this process relies on native copy-pasting. However, due to the smart paste features of PowerPoint, a simple copy&paste cycle is not always enough to this purpose.
For each slide, all the shapes that are supposed to appear later on by means of an entry effect must be preliminarly removed.

Building

As PPspliT is implemented as a VBA macro inside PowerPoint, there is no true build procedure. The source code is embedded in PowerPoint binary files that are saved as native PowerPoint add-ins: this is also the reason why changes are tracked in a separate file (PPspliT-source.txt).
The only step that requires building is the generation of distributable installers.

Prerequisites

Windows
- Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS)
- Office 2007 Custom UI editor -- As of June 2020, the link seems broken: you may try using the Office RibbonX Editor instead.
MacOS
- Script Editor (ships natively with MacOS)

Packaging for Windows

Edit the VBA macro inside PPT12+\PPspliT.pptm as needed, then prepare the file as follows:
- Update the release number if required (also in the about dialog box).
- Save the file (PPspliT.pptm).
- Copy the updated source code and paste it to file PPspliT-source.txt.
- Export the same file as a PowerPoint add-in (PPspliT.ppam).
- Open PPspliT.pptm using the Office 2007 Custom UI Editor or the Office RibbonX Editor, update the release number if required, and save the file.
- Do the same for PPspliT.ppam.
Apply consistent changes to file PPT11-\PPspliT.ppt, save it and export it as a PowerPoint 97-2003 add-in (PPspliT.ppa).
Edit file ppsplit_installer.nsi to refresh the release number if required.
Process file ppsplit_installer.nsi through NSIS (usually it is enough to right-click on the file and select "Compile NSIS script"). File PPspliT-setup.exe should then be generated in the parent folder.

Packaging for MacOS

Apply changes to PPspliT.pptm and export it as PowerPoint add-in PPspliT.ppam as described above for the Windows case.
Open file MacOS/PPspliT for MacOS/Install PPspliT.app using Apple's Script Editor.
Refresh resource PPspliT.ppam inside the script by dragging and dropping the updated PPspliT.ppam inside the Script Editor.
Save the installer and close the Script Editor.
Open a Terminal window and run script MacOS/PPspliT for MacOS/build_macos_dmg.sh to generate file PPspliT.dmg.

Known limitations

Yes, the list is apparently long, but please look carefully through it because it consists mostly of corner cases.

PPspliT does not offer any PDF conversion functions: it is not meant to. It just processes a presentation to split animations, then it is up to your favorite PDF generation software or PowerPoint's native PDF export function to generate the final PDF (or whatever other document format).
PPspliT does not preserve animation effects: the slide deck resulting from a split accurately renders the status of the slideshow at each intermediate animation step, but every slide is cleared of all animation effects. This means that you cannot have "moving shapes" in your final flat (PDF) document. Even if animations were preserved in the slides, embedding them in the final document would require advanced processing functions for every possible output document format, which is out of the scope of PPspliT, and would lead to much less portable documents.
All of the add-in features are implemented for all PowerPoint versions, but minor glitches may exist with versions prior to 2007, sometimes due to VBA limits or bugs.
Some functions are knowingly unsupported and may never be implemented:
- Slide transitions, as they are meant to smoothen slide changes and have no persistent effects on their contents.
- Shape dimming after playing an effect.
- Effects triggered by mouse clicks on a specific shape.
- The shaking and blinking emphasis effects, due to a PowerPoint bug.
- SmartArt objects because, to my knowledge, VBA does not offer a proper interface to individually process the shapes they are made of.
- Duration for emphasis effects (e.g., until next click or until the end of the slide): all emphasis effects last until the end of the slide.
- Accurate rendering of color effects: they do not perfectly match PowerPoint's behavior (which is not obvious to reverse engineer) but still provide an acceptable emphasis effect.
- Most emphasis and motion effects that apply to a single text paragraph instead of a whole shape. In general, all those effects whose rendering requires separation of the text frame from its parent shape are unlikely to be supported.
- Text effects applied to paragraphs containing a mixture of standard text and equations in the new native PowerPoint 2013 format (i.e., not Equation Editor objects).
- Accurate alignment of shapes in a group. This is hardly obtainable, as it depends on PowerPoint's copy&paste behavior. In the affected cases the same issue can be experienced with a manual copy&paste operation.
- Rasterized shape scaling. Indeed, PowerPoint applies effects to rasterized versions of the shapes, thus proportionally scaling all their elements (e.g., shape borders). Instead, PPspliT resizes the native shape, thus preserving its components (e.g., border thickness). The result is better because there is no pixelize effect, but it may be a little different from expected. This difference is enhanced for the case of font scaling for grow/shrinking emphasis effects: PPspliT renders this by changing font size by an amount that is a good compromise between horizontal and vertical growth/shrink.
- Accurate processing of emphasis effects affecting fill/line colors. For reasons which I haven't been able to figure out, sometimes color change settings in effects that are still to be processed get corrupted before reaching these effects, causing a failure to apply the intended color.
- Handling the auto-fit property for text frames, due to some limits in the interface that PowerPoint offers for this property (in PPT<2007 it is totally absent, while in PPT 2007 it seems to work fairly well).
- Accurate rendering of some rotation effects. During the presentation PowerPoint rotates shapes around the center of the visible shape body. Instead, PPspliT rotates it around the center of the container box. To explain the difference, consider an arc, whose container box is the rectangle (or, possibly, square) that encloses the full circle: PowerPoint would rotate the arc around the center of the arc stroke itself, whereas PPspliT would rotate it around the center of the container box, which is usually larger.
- Exit/entry effects applied to shapes that are part of a slide layout are only partially supported. In fact, these shapes are turned into placeholders (instead of disappearing altogether) when one attempts to delete them.
- Adjustment of slide numbers on a PPTX file that is imported into PowerPoint <=2003 using the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.
- Handling of bullet symbols in itemized lists: bullets may sometimes be lost or replaced with other symbols due to PowerPoint issues in pasting paragraph formats and to the inability to access the picture currently used for a bullet.
- Animations in slide masters.
- Something else I am not aware of.

References

Project home page
At the time of first sketching the add-in code, I used this blog post by Neil Mitchell and its follow-up as greatly inspirational starting points.

Acknowledgments

Although I am the only developer of the add-in, several suggestions for improvements and bug fixes came in the form of feedback from its end users. Some of them are acknowledged in the changelog.

Troubleshooting

The add-in is splitting only the first slide instead of the whole slide deck.
Maybe you have accidentally selected the first slide in the left-side thumbnail pane of PowerPoint. Just try clicking anywhere in the main pane of PowerPoint (i.e., the slide editor) and try PPspliTting again.
Error "Macro cannot be found or has been disabled because of security" is displayed every time I try to split slides.
As an outdated but, possibly, still valid explanation, a security update released by Microsoft around April 2012 may cause this issue with most VBA-based applications that make use of dialog boxes, including PPspliT. To correct this problem, Microsoft suggests deleting cached versions of control type libraries, which is harmless for your system. I can confirm that this solution has worked for me. Basically, you have to delete all .exd files stored in %HOMEPATH%\Application Data\Microsoft\Forms and %TEMP%\VBE. Please rely on the official instructions from Microsoft, which can be found in the page mentioned above.
If this does not solve your problem, then either you are still using an outdated PPspliT release (1.5 is known to have such compatibility problems) or your macro security settings may need to be reviewed.

draco1023 / PPspliT