Shyam's Toolbox for PowerPoint was born out code postings made by myself on the Microsoft PowerPoint newsgroup. I have always been a proponent of posting code examples. On many occasions I encountered that though the code would prove useful to the end user, he/she was at odds dealing with because of their unfamiliarity with VBA. Hence I decided to package the code snippets which have been posted by me in the past and still available in the archives into a user friendly interface. The process has been rather time consuming since I had to sift and decide what to include and what to discard. Thankfully, many of you have written in with your suggestions which have proved useful in shaping up the final release of Shyam's Toolbox.

New in Shyam's Toolbox:  Flash Movie Wizard - Insert a Flash Movie into a slide just as easily as an image.

The features of Shyam's Toolbox have been grouped together under various sub menus; categorized on the nature of the utility.

You can download the free time-limited trial version. None of the features have been disabled in the trial version. If you find the features available in Shyam's Toolbox useful, you can make a purchase online to register your copy and do away with the limitations.

The features page enumerates all the various utilities available in Shyam's Toolbox. You can also take a tour of the utility collection to learn more about the interface. Almost all the utilities included in Shyam's Toolbox have been used by myself at some point or the other during the development of this add-in.

To name a few :

• Menu Editor to generate the code that creates Shyam's Toolbox menus.

• Add to Custom Show is a personal favorite. I find it easy to switch to slide sorter view, select the slides in the order in which they show appear in the custom show, right-click & select 'Add to Custom Show'.

• Change links has always been a time saver while helping folks create an Auto-run CD.

• The Flash Movie Wizard to insert Flash movies in PowerPoint.

• Exporting the presentation text to ASCII file.

• The Menu Browser was used to gather information about the various PowerPoint menus to add context sensitive menu items to the various popup menus.

• The arranging/stacking/resizing of shapes.

• Toggling the update modes of OLE links to Manual whenever I don't want to be prompted to update the links.

• Converting the OLE shapes to pictures to reduce file size of final presentation for  distribution.

• The Analyzer which is not the part of Shyam's Toolbox but available separately is another utility I have come to rely on.