In this case, I only needed the form to look good in Notes because I would display the slide information on the Web using an HTML view. You can see the Presentation Form in Figure A.

FIGURE A

The Presentation Form is used for viewing and editing the slide information in Notes. Click picture for a larger image.

The CreatePresentationAgent agent described above will automatically create all the slides that you need, as well as attach the GIF and HTML files to them. But we're not done just yet.

There are two more agents to we need to run on these documents in order to extract the information from the HTML file and set the slide title and slide notes. The first is a LotusScript user interface agent called ImportTextAgent that opens up the document, pastes the contents of the HTML file into a text field, and then saves and closes the document. You can see the code for ImportTextAgent at http://www.component-net.com/dp-extras/powerpoint-2.html.

When you're in the Presentation View, select the first document by clicking somewhere on the row and click the Get Title and Note Information button from the action bar. After running the agent on the first document, use the down arrow key to select the next document and press the button again. Do this for all of the slides you've created.

Once the file text has been extracted and pasted into a text field for every document, you can then select all of the documents in the view with a check mark and then run the SetTitleNoteFields agent by Selecting the Set Title and Note Fields action button. This uses formula language functions such as @Middle to extract the slide title and the slide notes.

There is now only one more step required to make the presentation display correctly in both Notes and on the Web. You need to follow these steps:

1. Open up each of the documents
2. Double-click on the .GIF file and then select View from the Properties for Attachment menu
3. Once the image is open, select Select All from the Edit menu
4. Select Copy from the Edit menu
5. Escape back to the document
6. Go to the GifPicture field and select Paste Special from the Edit menu to paste the slide picture into this field as a bitmap.

This process is required in order for Notes users to view the presentation online. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do this automatically with LotusScript and Domino 4.5. If you know of a better way, please let me know. Also, if you audience is purely Web clients, you can forgo this step.

Viewing the presentation in Notes and on the Web
The final stage is where you bring all of this information together in an easily viewable format. Notes users have an easy way to view the slides by using the Presentation Form. They simply open up the Presentation View (a standard Notes view) and select the first slide of the presentation they want to see. Then they can navigate through the presentation with Next and Previous buttons. I also included another button that takes them back to the main Presentation View.