Find Wingdings character (Powerpoint 2013+)

Question

I'm looking for a way to programatically find a special Wingdings character on a slide.

e.g. the Wingdings character with a decimal code of 254.

However since it seems to be easy to do in Word (see here: https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/MacrosVBA/FindReplaceSymbols.htm) I can't figure out a way to do it in Powerpoint.

Word provides a function that gets name and the char code of a symbol

Sub GetCharNoAndFont()

With Dialogs(wdDialogInsertSymbol)
    Debug.Print "Font: " & .Font
    Debug.Print "Char number " & .CharNum
End With

End Sub

Is there any equivalent in Powerpoint?

Here, you can have some of mine; I've got plenty: ✘ ☒ ✓ ☑ ✘ ☒ ✓ ☑ ✘ ☒ ✓ ☑ ✘ ☒ ✓ ☑ — ashleedawg, Mar 03 '18 at 16:52
well yes. I want to be able to identify any characters that are not e.g. Arial. I wrote a function for shapes, tables, groups, bullet points etc. but symbols are pretty tricky since a textfield with a symbol inside does not show the font of that symbol — sangrila B, Mar 03 '18 at 16:53
yes somewhat. I need the code to search for the symbols in the second step — sangrila B, Mar 03 '18 at 18:11

ashleedawg · Answer 1 · 2018-03-04T18:33:36.823

0

I might still misunderstand your question (I'm not sure what you mean by search for symbols) but you could use:

Powerpoint:

TextRange.InsertSymbol Method (PowerPoint)
AscW Function (VBA)
ChrW Function (VBA)
Insert ASCII or Unicode Latin-based symbols and characters (Office 2007-2016)

Excel:

WorksheetFunction.Unicode Method to identify the code for a Unicode character.
WorksheetFunction.Unichar Method to return (display) a Unicode character.
WorksheetFunction.Find Method to find specific symbols on a worksheet.

edited Mar 04 '18 at 18:33

answered Mar 04 '18 at 10:52

ashleedawg

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PowerPoint doesn't have worksheet functions, though. – Steve Rindsberg Mar 04 '18 at 18:18
I had had a go at this. As far as I could see ChrW fails, the code returned for ASC I think was 63? Anyway, was for the ? not the tick. You can't identify the font as windings. Yes, you can iterate by character over the TextRange and use those functions but I still couldn't get one that correctly identified a check mark :-( I was very frustrated. – QHarr Mar 04 '18 at 19:08
what @QHarr said is exactly the problem! – sangrila B Mar 07 '18 at 14:26
It is a limitation of the object model. You could hack your way by detecting existence of a symbol character using the approach described by Qharr and then copy it to be the clipboard to parse the information and get the font or take a cleaner approach by using OpenXml to detect symbols and get the font information. – Shyam Pillai Mar 14 '18 at 04:48

Find Wingdings character (Powerpoint 2013+)

1 Answers1

Powerpoint:

Excel: