PowerPointLabsLives

PowerPointLabs - created by students at the National University of Singapore - new installer

Home Page: https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~pptlabs/

The typical PowerPoint presentation isn't very interesting. Walls of text or bullet points, with few visuals - it's no wonder audiences find it hard to pay attention.

Your slides don't have to be this way, and it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to make them better.

PowerPointLabs is an open source project based in the National University of Singapore. It makes creating engaging PowerPoint presentations easy.

Fancy animations, simplified - Animation Lab makes multi-step multi-object custom animations a breeze.

Zoom and pan with ease - Easily zoom in on and pan between parts of your slides with Zoom Lab.

Narrate your speaker notes - Narrations Lab creates audio explanations from your speaker notes - perfect for self-learning materials.

Caption with a click - Want subtitles with your narration? Captions Lab makes it a one-click process.

Point-by-point highlights - Highlight individual bullet points to show what you're describing with Highlight Lab.

Special effects without special software - Draw attention to a part of the slide with a spotlight or blurring out the rest. Effects Lab has you covered.

Tweak positions to match your layout - Use Positions Lab to perfectly position shapes to create the exact layout you want.

Resize with precision - Resize shapes to match other shapes or to the size you want using Resize Lab.

Match colors, perfectly - Colors Lab makes picking colors a snap, even from outside PowerPoint.

Sync just the styles you want - Sync Lab can copy selected styles from one object to other objects.

Save the shapes, and your effort - Add shapes or other elements to Shapes Lab, and reuse them easily in any presentation.

Cut out custom shapes - Need just part of an image? Crop Lab lets you cut it in the exact shape you want, no image editor necessary.

Paste with more control - Replace an image while preserving its animations. Paste Lab provides many different new ways for you to paste objects in slides.

Add timers to guide in-presentation activities - Want your audience to do an activity for 10 seconds? Timer Lab lets you create visual timers for your slides.

Create roadmaps for long presentations - Need a roadmap for your presentation? Agenda Lab builds one with a single click.

Create picture slides the easy way - No more long hours of tweaking picture slides. With Picture Slides Lab, all you need to do is compare pictures, compare styles and choose the one you like!

Extract this package into a new folder and run build.bat as your normal Windows user. Internet access is required to build. Open the resulting PowerPointLabs_6.1.0.2_Setup_XXXXXXXX.msi, approve its displayed publisher certificate, then start desktop PowerPoint. Close PowerPoint before installing, repairing, upgrading or uninstalling. Install using the Windows account that will run PowerPoint. No administrator elevation is needed for this per-user MSI.

The supplied add-on is named PowerPointLabs 6.1.0.2 internally. Its filenames, assembly names and Office registration retain that name.

Contents and operation

One executable source file, build.bat, contains the PowerShell build logic, WiX installer definition and necessary certificate installation/rollback code. There are no tests, probes, monitoring, timing, analysis or evidence frameworks. The 18 application files are the original payload, not builder scaffolding. TestInterface.dll is a dependency of the supplied application and is retained.

The batch downloads a private .NET 8 SDK, Microsoft Mage 10.0.0 and WiX 3.14.1 into a unique temporary folder. It deletes that folder, including downloaded archives and build intermediates, on completion or a handled failure. A forced termination or power loss can leave that temporary folder behind. It does not uninstall system runtimes or alter tool caches created by previous versions. Each build therefore downloads its own build tools again.

Original application files and Signing are preserved. The MSI receives flat, colocated manifests, DLLs and configuration. The original post-action assembly reference is corrected from PostInstall to PowerPointLabs. Mage signs the application manifest, updates its deployment reference and hash, then signs the deployment manifest with the same certificate used to sign the MSI. The original DLLs are not recompiled or re-signed.

Signing

Choose one:

• Leave Signing empty: generate a reusable 3072-bit RSA code-signing certificate. Save its encrypted private key as Signing/CodeSigning.pfx and its password as Signing/CodeSigning.password.dpapi, protected by the current Windows account on this computer. These are reused on subsequent builds.
• Supply Signing/CodeSigning.pfx: enter its password when prompted. When replacing a generated PFX, move its old .password.dpapi file out of Signing.
• Supply Signing/CertificateThumbprint.txt: one certificate thumbprint, for an accessible RSA code-signing private key in the current user's Personal store.

Do not supply both PFX and thumbprint. Generated certificates expire after three years; this local signing process does not use an online timestamp service. Preserve your key material securely. Generated DPAPI passwords are not portable to another Windows account/computer. Private keys are never included in the MSI and are ignored by Git. A supplied organization certificate requires its issuing CA chain to be trusted on the destination machine.

The installer displays the exact certificate thumbprint and requires consent before adding the public certificate to Current User Trusted Publishers. For a self-signed certificate, it also adds it to Current User Trusted Root. It preserves pre-existing trust, rolls back changes if installation fails and removes only trust it owns on uninstall. Trust applies to other code signed by this key too. Office security policies are not changed. Organization policy may prohibit local publisher trust or the add-in even with a valid signature.

Requirements

Windows 10/11, Windows PowerShell 5.1 and desktop PowerPoint. The destination also needs .NET Framework 4.5 or later and Microsoft VSTO Runtime 2010 or later. The temporary modern .NET SDK is a build tool; it does not replace those runtimes. The MSI stops with an error if its runtime prerequisites are missing.

Warranty

Absolutely no warranty or guarantee of any sort. It works for me.

Licensing and source

build.bat and the creator documentation are MIT licensed; see LICENSE. The supplied PowerPointLabs application retains its GPLv2 license and third-party components retain their existing licenses. See GPL-2.0.txt. The MIT license does not relicense the bundled application or third-party DLLs.

Pinned original source

The original GPLv2 PowerPointLabs source is included as a Git submodule at upstream/PowerPointLabs, pinned to commit 79e6be4882b736a0cb4828e06a96286de9b3aed6 (May 16, 2020). The upstream C# project at this revision declares application version 6.1.0.2.

To obtain this repository and its pinned original source:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/FredThompsonII/PowerPointLabsLives.git

For an existing clone:

git submodule update --init --recursive

See SOURCE_PROVENANCE.md for the exact revision, source attribution, and reproducibility commands. Source provenance supplied with the original package: https://github.com/FredThompsonII/PowerPointLabsLives/tree/79e6be4882b736a0cb4828e06a96286de9b3aed6 This source reference is provenance, not a claim that it reproduces the supplied binaries. Do not publish generated signing material or locally built installers to GitHub.

Microsoft deployment and signing references: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/vsto/deploying-a-vsto-solution-by-using-windows-installer https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/mage-exe-manifest-generation-and-editing-tool