Printing multiple PowerPoint presentations with Windows PowerShell

In a previous post I mentioned that when we (Critical Path Training) make changes to a course we have to update a lot of PowerPoint presentations. We then print these out as PDF’s to generate our course manual. This can be a tedious process. The previous post discussed how I was able to use the Open XML SDK 2.0 to automate the process of updating the headers and footers in each slide in each presentation, reducing a task that would typically take an hour or more down to about 15 seconds.

The next step is to generate PDF files from the presentation. This too is a tedious task… one that’s just a pain. After digging around in the TechNet Windows PowerShell forums, I was able to figure out how to automate this process with Windows PowerShell!

The following script looks at all *.PPTX files in a folder, and for each one it opens it up, sets the printer to use (in this case I prefer to use the Adobe PDF Writer that you get with Acrobat) set a few properties and then tell PowerPoint to print the file.

In the script, the OutputType property signifies what print mode you want. I generally use two values:

OutputType = 2: Prints out two slides per page without the presenter’s notes.
OutputType = 5: Prints out one slide with the presenter notes at the bottom.

Technorati Tags: windows powershell,powershell,powerpoint

posted on Thursday, May 06, 2010 7:08 AM

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# re: Printing multiple PowerPoint presentations with Windows PowerShell 5/26/2010 2:36 PM Francisco

I have been looking for something like this for a while! Thanks so much for sharing. Do you know if it's possible to make multiple power points into one pdf rather than separate ones?
Thanks again!

# re: Printing multiple PowerPoint presentations with Windows PowerShell 5/26/2010 8:38 PM AC [MVP SharePoint]

Francisco-
Yup... Acrobat. I haven't seen a free PDF utility for that sutff.

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