Powerpoint spellchecking & Applescript...

I’m using Powerpoint 2008 and I am looking for a way to change the spelling language of the text boxes in slides.

The AS dictionary does not seem to contain anything that allows for that (unlike Word, in a very convoluted way).

Any idea how I could go about doing that?

This works to check spelling in Powerpoint 2011 and should probably work in 2008.

Manually. Click in the text box you want to spell check. Do a select all (Command-a). Then, either press Command-Option-l (thats a lower case L) or select “Spelling…” from under the “Tools” menu.

Programatically: The following will run the spell check on the currently open window in Powerpoint.


tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"
	activate
	launch speller on active window
end tell

Hope this helps…

Thank you for the reply.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. My question was not about executing the spellchecking, but about changing the language of all the text boxes at once.

When I use Select All, I can select all the text boxes in 1 slide and then I have to manually access the “language selection” item in the Tool menu to change the language.

PPT does not seem to offer a way to do that in AS.

Also, I can’t select all the text boxes for all the document, I am limited to do that on a slide per slide basis.

Sorry, I finally get it. You want to change the language say “English” to say “French”.

Check out the following discussion that provides a number of ways for doing this. Unfortunately, a straight forward AppleScript method doesn’t appear to be available. Having said that, if anyone knows how, they will now inform us.

https://superuser.com/questions/55034/change-the-spell-checking-language-on-a-powerpoint-presentation

Yes, I saw solutions similar to this one, but for some reason, they don’t work in (Mac) Powerpoint 2008. Only (Windows) Powerpoint 2003 and 2007. Hence the request for a scriptable solution.

I guess what’s left is GUI scripting…