Reapply the Notes Master to each Notes Page in a presentation

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Sometimes you need to reapply the Notes Master to every notes page in a presentation. Manually, figure on four or five mouseclicks per slide to do this. Then double it because sometimes you need to reapply the master a few times to make it stick.

This little macro will do the job for you. Hint: it may not work if you run it from within the VBA IDE (the VB editor). Instead, choose Tools, Macro, Macros (or in 2007 or later, Developer tab, Macros) then click the ApplyMasterToNotes macro and click Run.

Sub ApplyMasterToNotes()
' Modified version of code originally posted to msnews.microsoft.com public newsgroups
' by David Foster in May of 1999
' PowerPoint doesn't expose any method for reapplying notes masters to notes pages
' David's comment:
' "I suppose you could try a really ugly hack like the one below, though:"
' His version applied the notes master to a single slide
' I've changed it to reapply the master to all slides in the current presentation
' Note:  on my system it doesn't work w/o the added DoEvents

    Dim ctl As CommandBarControl
    Dim oSl As Slide

    ' 700 is the control ID for Layout
    Set ctl = CommandBars.FindControl(Id:=700)
    ActiveWindow.ViewType = ppViewNotesPage

    If (ctl Is Nothing) Then
        MsgBox "command not available"
        Exit Sub
    End If

    For Each oSl In ActivePresentation.Slides

        ' go to the current slide
        ActiveWindow.View.GotoSlide (oSl.SlideIndex)
        DoEvents

        ' Bring up the dialog
        ctl.Execute
        DoEvents

        ' send it the needed keystrokes
        SendKeys "%r{enter}"
        DoEvents

    Next

End Sub

See How do I use VBA code in PowerPoint? to learn how to use this example code.

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