Auto Events

Auto Events is an add-in created for Microsoft PowerPoint, which gives you the possibility to enable macro support for opening, closing and printing presentations, showing when a slideshow starts and stops, as well as for loading the next slide in a presentation.

It was designed to compensate for the lack of auto macro support in older PowerPoint editions, when this was only available for automatically opening and closing PowerPoint presentations.

The downloaded package contains two files, one for loading the add-in (AutoEvents.ppa) and one for previewing the automatic macro features (autoevent.ppt) in an empty slideshow.

Once Microsoft Excel is opened, go to the Add-ins tab click Auto Events, then select Enable Auto Events to activate this feature. By default, all macro events supported by this tool are loaded.

However, you can exclude any of them by selecting Auto Events options from the Auto Events menu in the Add-ins tab.

In the popup window, you can view the technical description of each type of event as well as clear the boxes of the ones you don't want to activate trigger automatic actions for: opening, closing and printing presentations, letting you know when a slideshow begins and ends, as well as playing the next slide in the show.

For example, if you hover your mouse over "Presentation Open Event", the utility tells you that "Every time a presentation is about to be printed, then the Auto_Print subroutine, if present within it, will be fired." To disable the macro support without uninstalling the app, open the Auto Events menu in the Add-ins tab and clear the Enable Auto Events option.

All things considered, Auto Events can be a helpful assistant for users looking to enhance the functionality of their PowerPoint presentations by adding macro support for important events.

It worked well on Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 in our tests. The only issue we found with this app is that the technical descriptions are too advanced for casual users.