Powerpoint Closing after use

1

Hi everyone.

We’ve recently started using Quelea (version 2020.0) and have noticed that after we’ve used a PowerPoint presentation it automatically closes. Is this expected behaviour and if so can it be turned off or is it an issue that we’re experiencing?

We have simple workarounds with multiple presentations but for simplicity it would be handy to just use a single presentation multiple times.

2

Hi Paddy123123,

Welcome to the Quelea community! I wrote the PowerPoint code some years ago and I remember that the behavior that PowerPoint is closed after switching items is intentional, but I’m not sure what the reason was. Might be that there were issues with opening a new presentation when an old instance was running, or I just figured that you don’t want old instances of PowerPoint running when it’s no longer used.

However, I’m not sure what you mean with using a single presentation multiple times, are you not able to run the same presentation twice?

Are you running Quelea on Windows or on Mac? If you are running it on Windows, you could actually manually delete the lines that closes PowerPoint. (Click here to read how.)

In your installation path (e.g. C:/Program Files/Quelea) there’s a directory called vbs and in there you’ll find a script called closePresentation.vbs. If you open that file in a text editor you can just delete its content and PowerPoint should not automatically close in the future. (You might also be able to delete the file altogether, but I haven’t double-checked with the code so that it won’t cause any crashes or so.)

Just note that there could be some issues with this behavior, so if you do test it out, I’d appreciate if you let us know how it works.

In case you’d need to reset the file content, here’s the file.

With that said, we should probably evaluate if this feature is necessary or if we could make it optional in the future.

Thanks,

Arvid

3

I had this issue as well, and then I realized quelea was not recognizing the PowerPoint program, forcing me to manually open the app, and as you can imagine, this became a real pain. so I had to create a shortcut to PowerPoint.exe and put it in a folder in documents. Try that and see if it will work. It can be done easily by finding it in start and dragging it to your folder, so really you’re creating a shortcut to a shortcut to the app. Hope it helps!

4

Thanks, that’s probably the answer to the question I didn’t know to ask! I’ll try the code removal option as well and feedback.