How to change text field in a PPT programmatically in C#?

Question

I have a PPT template in which I need to programmatically replace some text fields with data that comes from my database then convert the ppt to pdf and send it as attachment in an email. I am not sure of how to change the content of text fields in the PowerPoint Presentation. I think OpenXML needs to be used. Please help me to feed dynamic data into my ppt template.

Answer 1

I have worked previously with the DocumentFormat.OpenXml from Microsoft but with word files. I played a bit with it to replace some Texts in a Power Point file.

Here is my simple test code snippet:

static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // just gets me the current location of the assembly to get a full path
        string fileName = GetFilePath("Resource\\Template.pptx");

        // open the presentation in edit mode -> the bool parameter stands for 'isEditable'
        using (PresentationDocument document = PresentationDocument.Open(fileName, true))
        {
            // going through the slides of the presentation
            foreach (SlidePart slidePart in document.PresentationPart.SlideParts)
            {
                // searching for a text with the placeholder i want to replace
                DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Drawing.Text text = 
                    slidePart.RootElement.Descendants<DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Drawing.Text>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Text == "[[TITLE]]");

                // change the text
                if (text != null)
                    text.Text = "My new cool title";

                // searching for the second text with the placeholder i want to replace
                text =
                    slidePart.RootElement.Descendants<DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Drawing.Text>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Text == "[[SUBTITLE]]");

                // change the text
                if (text != null)
                    text.Text = "My new cool sub-title";
            }

            document.Save();
        }
    }

In my case i had a simple presentation with one slide and in the Text fields the entries "[[TITLE]]" and "[[SUBTITLE]]" which i replaced with this text.

For my test file this worked well but maybe you will need to adopt / change something for your specific file. E.g. in Word i had sometimes texts which was splitted in multiple Text parts within a Run element and had to write a logic to "collect" this data and replace them with one Text element with the new text i wanted to be there or maybe you have to search for other Descendant types.