PowerPoint 2013 - Kiosk Mode with Touch Enabled - Touch does not work with Mouse Click Action Configured on Text Boxes

I believe the real reason why PowerPoint 2013 is not touch enabled in kiosk mode is due to Windows 8 and its annoying charms bar. Why else lock out touch in what could be marketed as an easy, affordable, interactive digital signage. Using Windows 7 and a touch screen overlay worked for us, but windows 10 may offer hope with the removal of the charms bar.

Just by way of clarification of my original post, ours is a museum situation where the first page of our presentation is a village map with multiple hotspots hyperlinked to a series of subsequent pages holding details of individual dwellings, former residents etc.

The initial problem we had was that touch wouldn’t work with Kiosk mode enabled. We therefore disabled Kiosk mode only to discover that clumsy visitors were tapping the screen in a way that the screen interpreted as a gesture (e.g. magnify the image). That changed the location of the visual indicators of the hotspots whilst the hotspots themselves remained in the original locations. The result, of course, was that tapping on the visual indicators ceased to have any effect.

We reverted to an earlier version of Powerpoint.  This addressed the Kiosk mode issue though we still have the lesser problem of the charms bar still being available to anyone so minded.

Ryan : "Consider this scenario: a vendor is using PPT to display slides to an audience on a touch monitor in a mall.  They definitely want touch to be disabled so users do not change the SlideShow.  That is most common kiosk scenario and what we usually design around (hence, our decision)."

The VBA developpers need is : During PPSM Kiosk mode, if (SHAPE is TOUCHed) --AND-- (ShapeHas VBA _Click Event OR ShapeHas ActionEvent) then execute this code. The PEN (stylus) on a touch screen does the job: when a shape (not ActiveX) is touched with the pen, the VBE fires the 'on click' event but not on a finger touch event !?! What is the difference?

If there is no VBA code, the touch on the screen does nothing and users (in a mall, a museum) then there would be no reason to change the sideshow...? You just need to fire the event if there is one. 

Same thing for drag and drop events with a finger... does the job on a shape with a pen but not a finger in Kiosk?

TIP for other developpers : For 'gesture' like Swipe in PPSM/PPTM, we use a WebBrowser ActiveX in the presentation and show a screen that can be swiped left-right (Dynamic HTML build on the fly by VBA code in PPT as needed). This allows us to present a "finger touch" scrollable (swipe left-right) e-learning catalog... almost like in the Window Store. We catch back the event (selection touch of web textbox/button) to show the TabTip keyboard, and interact or go to the slide we need in the PowerPoint application.

Your scenario is one of the craziest, coolest things I've ever heard done with Windows+PPT.  Just Awesome.

I'm going to fix two things:

1. Being able to exit SS with press+hold by adding a new option to disable it
2. Be able to tap on hyperlinks

Remember, I can't guarantee these will ever make it into an official build :(.  But, I will certainly make a case for them. 

Do you mind if I share how you're using PPT with our team?  It's really inspirational!  We're very interested in education and, I hope, some would be interested seeing if there was anything PPT could do to help out.

As for email, I can't figure out how to send you a private message...

Hello Ryan and Matt,

On our side, we are developing a complete e-learning/corporate communication system with PowerPoint as the base because it allows our Customers to easily modify their content and to create interactive e-learning applications (interactions like drag-drop, quiz Q/R-scoring system, web-browsing, auto-certificate generation, pdf content, email of content/training certificates to users … all inside PPT slideshows).

We use Surface2 and Surface3 to provide our customers with "kind of their own operating system". The tablets are booting with our PPSM as SHELL (thus, no Explorer.exe, no Desktop, no Charm, ... not much of Windows!). Booting SHELL directly in PowerPoint PPSM is working fine and solved a lot of problem. But it created others, we had to design the system to be "event based" from start to end: we provide custom interfaces for Wi-Fi selection, network detection, screen rotation, sound/volume/mixer, webcam and real time battery level monitoring. We also show real time and elapsed time on every slides, near the icons that show the status of the battery and Wi-Fi. Booting as shell required to take care of the hardware interfaces. Booting directly to our PPSM-Shell instead of Windows is also faster!

We are installing Ms SQL Express on the tablets as local DB and using the "PPSM Operating system" to sync/replicate to a master DB (SQL Server 2008). This also provides the functionality of an 'application store' where the company can add other custom e-learning through categories. At every boot of a station, it connects to see if it must update itself and the content. The custom applications created by our customers with PowerPoint and our PPAM are stored (published) as BLOB on the Main server, then distributed at the next Sync. 

The system is installed simply plugging an USB key and booting the Surface with our custom image (Window Deployment Tools) that will replace the main hard disk partition (wiping the existing Windows), this way, we get a clean image with exactly the software we need, the registry needed and the basic Operating System based on PPT2013 PPSM-VBA. The first time this tablet is booting, it's connecting to the network to upload the most recent version of the PPSM-OS and then loads the most recent version of all the system (Application/Catalog of PPSM content available to end users). 10 minutes after connecting the USB key, the tablet is customized and ready to use.

Our whole system is multi-languages: French, English and Spanish. We use VBA / SQL dictionary table to translate on the fly all the shapes and ActiveX. The whole navigation between slides is code-managed (only our buttons allow the user to navigate and we bring them where we want). 

We also built a PPT2013 Complement (PPAM) that greatly enlarge the functions of PowerPoint to allow our Customer to rapidly create e-Learning (with a complete Quiz Engine : Question, Responses, scores) depending on the settings, the application will issue PDF certificates and PDF competency cards. All those information are stored on the local SQL then Sync on the main SQL the next time a (VPN) network connection is available. Our Customer can also add slides with 'WebApp' components and 'PDFviewer' ... and finaly, even more features.

Like inside PowerPoint, we use the built-in tablet webcam so our customers’ employees can take a selfie picture (auto-portrait) that is added to their competency card / employee card.

We did manage to get the touch working only by using the OLD Form2.0/VB6 ActiveX (CommandButton_Click, Picture_Click, Label_Click, etc.) .

The fact that that "SHAPES"(all of them!) don't work with touch ... but DO work with MOUSE is a definitive problem. Touchable shapes would look so much better than CommandButton that are giving our system a Win98 look ;-)

As you can see, we are doing a lot more with PowerPoint ... than most users.

Email me if you want screenshots or more details.

Waiting to see if we can have a quick solution/hotix to TOUCHABLE Hyperlinks and... Shapes! All Shapes_touch as mouse_click!

Thank you.