Powerpoint 2003: Company-specific File-New-Dialog

Request: During the migration from Office 97 to Office 2003 the QA department notices that the FileNew dialog has been replaced by the Task Pane "New document". The company templates are not immediately shown, but need a drill-down to the "Templates from my computer" item on the Task Pane.

However, users should have immediate access to the company templates. Users shall not see the Microsoft Template Catalog, but immediately the company-specific templates.

Solution: Powerpoint does not provide the functionality to load an Add-iIn file on startup and execute a program. So a COM Add-in developed with Visual Basic is provided. Registry settings under "Local Machine" assure that the Add-in is loaded for every user. The FileNew command is replaced by a custom dialog, which shows the Powerpoint templates of the company and it's branches in layout preview.

The dialog is configured through a XML configuration file on startup, so that administrators can add new tabs and new templates in the dialog without need to recurr to the developer.