Adding a WebBrowser on a slide in PowerPoint 2016 using a VSTO AddIn

Question

I am working on an VSTO AddIn for PowerPoint. One of the AddIn's features is to add life web pages on slides.

In the previous versions of PPT I could simply do:

var browserShape = slide.Shapes.AddOLEObject(
        x, y, width, height,
        "Shell.Explorer.2"
    ) as PowerPoint.Shape;

But now with PowerPoint 2016 I get an OLE exception.

Is there a new (maybe even better) way to place working web pages on slides? What changed? Why doesn't the old way work anymore?

So how do I add life web pages to slides in PowerPoint 2016? Please note that I don't have a way to force my customers to install some other plugin.

Thanks in advance.

Microsoft supplies a plugin that states it can add a life web page to a slide (see link - never got it work though). So at least Microsoft thinks it's possible. — O. Hahn

Jon Marnock Jon Marnock · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-20T07:52:47

Did this work in 2013, but now fails in 2016? I ask because MS made a pretty big change from 2010 to 2013 that would cause this, but as far as I know there wasn't really any ~additional~ relevant changes since then.

I maintain a product I wrote that uses dynamically generated PowerPoint presentations that include (among other things) live webpages (using a VSTO plugin I wrote that enables the live webpage functionality).

Here's the code I use to insert the web browser object into the slide:

slide.Shapes.AddOLEObject(0, 0, presentation.PageSetup.SlideWidth, presentation.PageSetup.SlideHeight, "Shell.Explorer.2");

That's basically the same as yours.

The difference is probably http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2793374 where MS decided to disable the web browser control for security reasons, which my system attempts to re-enable writing the relevant registry keys, and then going one step further with http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee330730%28VS.85%29.aspx#browser_emulation to update the browser emulation to a more recent version of IE (I think it defaults to 7 or 9 or something - I update it to IE11 so it supports HTML5 and a bunch of other stuff that the older IE browsers do terribly).

It's up to you how you do it - you could manually get your clients to run a .reg file to patch a machine once, or you could try and do it inside the app itself (my advice: that's a lot of work due to privilege elevation being required to write to those registry keys).

Assuming 32bit office, the basic idea though is:

For 2013, set [SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\COM Compatibility\{8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2}]"Compatability Flags"=dword:00000000
For 2016, set [SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\COM Compatibility\{8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2}]"Compatability Flags"=dword:00000000
Set [SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION]"POWERPNT.EXE"=dword:00002711 (or higher - that codes for IE10, there's also 00002AF8 and 00002AF9 which code for IE11 with varying levels of strictness).

Obviously MS disabled this for a reason, so it's up to you how much you care about security and how dangerous re-enabling this may be.

On a personal level, from one VSTO developer to another, I am so sorry for you :D

Adding a WebBrowser on a slide in PowerPoint 2016 using a VSTO AddIn

1 Answers