Text is right to left, bullets appear on right of text

Problem

If your presentation's bullets appear on the right side of the text and left justified text appears to be right justified instead, it may be that the presentation was created in English but on a system set to a language that uses right-to-left text (ie, Hebrew, Arabic, or possibly Chinese/Japanese/Korean if the user has enabled right-to-left input, probably on a non-English system).

Solution

If your system has support for one of these languages, you may see PowerPoint formatting options for changing the direction.

Even so, changing layout direction paragraph by paragraph can be quite tedious, and if you don't have these options available, you're stuck.

Or are you?

VBA to the rescue

While PowerPoint itself may not let you get at the settings you need, it'll let VBA in the back door. This little macro will quickly reset all the text in your presentation to Left-To-Right:

Sub ResetLeftToRight()

    Dim oSh As Shape
    Dim oSl As Slide

    ' make sure slide sorter reads left to right    
    ActivePresentation.LayoutDirection = ppDirectionLeftToRight

    ' then fix each of the text boxes
    For Each oSl In ActivePresentation.Slides
        For Each oSh In oSl.Shapes
            On Error Resume Next
            If oSh.HasTextFrame Then
                If oSh.TextFrame.HasText Then
                    WIth oSh.TextFrame.TextRange.ParagraphFormat
                         .TextDirection = ppDirectionLeftToRight
                    End With 
                End If
            End If
        Next    ' shape
    Next    ' slide

End Sub

Thanks to (newly minted PPT MVP as of early 2007) John Wilson for his help tracking this one down.

See How do I use VBA code in PowerPoint? to learn how to use this example code.

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