title: VBA for Microsoft PowerPoint to recognize and hide text boxes in German language
body: <p>I need to make two presentations with the same slides, backgrounds, and everything except for the text: one in German and one in English. Therefore I have two separate presentations which I must always simultaneously update, otherwise one language version will be outdated and I often forget what I changed.</p>
  
  <p>I have made a custom show with all of the slides copied into one PowerPoint presentation and that works fairly well, but I still must change two of the same slides each time that I make an edit to one language. </p>
  
  <p>Therefore, I'm trying to write a macro that will recognize all textboxes within the presentation with German text in them and hide them during the show, and vice versa. Then, each of the macros would be linked to a hyperlinked box on the title slide called 'English' or 'German' which, when clicked, would hide the textboxes in the other languages while also leaving all pictures and formatting the same. Ideally, the macro would hide all boxes in one language and make all the boxes in the other language visible again within the same step, so that the presentation is always usable and I don't have a user who opens a PPT with 'no text boxes' because they would all be hidden...</p>
  
  <p>In order to achieve this I have two text boxes containing the text in both languages on the same slide, that's why I'd like to hide the textboxes.</p>
  
  <p>I am able to get all text boxes hidden but not text boxes in a specific language (aka, all boxes regardless of their editing language will get hidden but not any specific ones).</p>
  
  <p>PS - text boxes do not NEED to be referenced here... it could just refer to a shape. I was trying to avoid, that Pictures would be hidden and thought text boxes would be the best way to reference what I wanted. </p>
  
  <p>Is there a better way?</p>
  
  <p>I don't really know how to reference a language in VBA, I found this website by accident and thought someone might have a quick trick to help me out with this issue. The code I have which will blend out textboxes but not blend out specific language-boxes is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Sub GermanTextBoxFinder()
      Dim SlideToCheck As Slide
      Dim ShapeIndex As Integer
        ' Visit each slide
      For Each SlideToCheck In ActivePresentation.Slides
        ' On each slide, count down through the shapes
      For ShapeIndex = SlideToCheck.Shapes.Count To 1 Step -1
        ' If the shape IS a text box and DOES have German text
      If SlideToCheck.Shapes(ShapeIndex).Type = msoTextBox And _
      MsoLanguageID.msoLanguageIDGerman _
  Then
      ' Toggle visibility of German Textboxes
      SlideToCheck.Shapes(ShapeIndex).Visible = msoFalse
  End If
  Next
  Next
  
  End Sub
  </code></pre>