Create a New Presentation

VSTO was developed to let developers build applications that could run inside Microsoft Office. VSTO is COM-based but it’s wrapped inside a .NET object so that it can be used in .NET applications. VSTO needs .NET framework support as well as Microsoft Office CLR-based runtime. Although it can be used for making Microsoft Office add-ins it is nearly impossible to use as a server-side component. It also has serious deployment problems.

Aspose.Slides for .NET is a component that can be used to manipulate Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, just like VSTO, but it has several advantages:

• Aspose.Slides contains managed code only and doesn’t require Microsoft Office runtime to be installed.
• It can be used as a client-side component or as a server side component.
• Deployment is easy since Aspose.Slides is contained in a single DLL.

Creating a Presentation

Below are two code examples that illustrate how VSTO and Aspose.Slides for .NET can be used to achieve the same goal. The first example is VSTO; the second example uses Aspose.Slides.

VSTO Example

The VSTO output

//Note: PowerPoint is a namespace which has been defined above like this
//using PowerPoint = Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint;

//Create a presentation
PowerPoint.Presentation pres = Globals.ThisAddIn.Application
	.Presentations.Add(Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoTriState.msoFalse);

//Get the title slide layout
PowerPoint.CustomLayout layout = pres.SlideMaster.
	CustomLayouts[PowerPoint.PpSlideLayout.ppLayoutTitle];

//Add a title slide.
PowerPoint.Slide slide = pres.Slides.AddSlide(1, layout);

//Set the title text
slide.Shapes.Title.TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Slide Title Heading";

//Set the sub title text
slide.Shapes[2].TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Slide Title Sub-Heading";

//Write the output to disk
pres.SaveAs("c:\\outVSTO.ppt",
	PowerPoint.PpSaveAsFileType.ppSaveAsPresentation,
	Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoTriState.msoFalse);

Aspose.Slides for .NET Example

The output from Aspose.Slides

//Create a presentation
Presentation pres = new Presentation();

//Add the title slide
ISlide slide = pres.Slides.AddEmptySlide(pres.LayoutSlides[0]);


//Set the title text
((IAutoShape)slide.Shapes[0]).TextFrame.Text = "Slide Title Heading";

//Set the sub title text
((IAutoShape)slide.Shapes[1]).TextFrame.Text = "Slide Title Sub-Heading";

//Write output to disk
pres.Save("c:\\data\\outAsposeSlides.pptx", SaveFormat.Ppt);