Synch Data from PowerPoint to HyperWorks Desktop

HyperWorks Desktop automatically adds the Altair add-in tool to PowerPoint when you first use PowerPoint Publishing. The Altair menu options allow you to take the updates from your PowerPoint presentation and sync them to your HyperWorks Desktop session. You can also view the tag names and actual values of the object in the presentation using View Names and View Values.


Figure 1.
Sync Live
Click Sync Live to perform a live update to your PowerPoint presentation with the changes made to your HyperWorks Desktop session.
Tag Table
Displays the tag name for each object in your session and its format. From this table, you can view the tags and verify that the connections or links between the HyperWorks Desktop session and PowerPoint are established. The connection is retained by the tag name. To change the tag's format, click in the Format cell and select a new type from the drop-down menu.


For Linux Only: Sync File
On Linux, you can also sync a modified PowerPoint presentation, however the work flow is different. You can publish from a HyperWorks Desktop session to a new PowerPoint file only; the other options are disabled in the Publishing PowerPoint GUI. If you modify your HyperWorks Desktop session, you cannot synchronize those changes with an existing or opened PowerPoint file using live link like you can on Windows. You have to use Publish to transfers those changes to an existing PowerPoint presentation.
A *.vbs file, *.xml file and the directory [demo_pptData] are created when you publish from HyperWorks Desktop on Linux to PowerPoint. Double-click the *.vbs file to open the PowerPoint file when you want to create a new PowerPoint presentation.
When you want to update your presentation from PowerPoint, use Sync File to load the XML file that contains any changes to the HyperWorks Desktop session. See Using PowerPoint Publishing on Linux for more information.
View Names
Click View Names to view the tag names on the PowerPoint slides. The tag values indicate if the tag came from HyperWorks Desktopp or if it was directly added in PowerPoint. For example, below is an example of a HyperWorks Desktop session tag:


Figure 2.
Text tags are string-based and require a string match to retain a connection. If you enter text in the tagged text field in PowerPoint, the tag will break. The broken tag is displayed in red. A broken tag also displays Missing "Tag Name" on the PowerPoint slide. For example, the text "Crash Comparison" has been altered in PowerPoint and as a result, the tag is broken, as illustrated in the image below.


Figure 3.
View Values
Click View Values to view the actual values of the tags (images, animations, plots and text) in PowerPoint file.