Looking for a howto for an applescript to batch convert PPTS to Keynote...

Question

Looking for a howto for an applescript to batch convert PPTS to Keynote...
Hi to group!
(cross posted this a couple of weeks ago to Keynote forum, no responses) Perhaps the query really belongs here...)
(I) Have a whole bunch of PPTs to convert to Keynote, now and more as time goes on.
Looked into applescript to try to automate this a bit (could open PPT file but did not see any way to 'Save' file from a script).
Also looked into bash scripting/automator too -- way too many options to choose from. Help!
Anybody done anything similar to this already?
TIA for pointers. //GH

Answer 1

A word of caution.
I have not tried the workflow before.
I am not an applescript expert.
These steps were quickly composed using my basic knowledge in Applescript
What I was planning was to create a script droplet that when a ppt file is dropped upon it, it extracts the name of the file and sets it to a variable to name the keynote file later. You might have to modify it a bit to batch process multiple files.
Try going through batch processing scripts made for quark or Adobe photoshop ( Not sure if these exist on internet) to see how they have implemented the steps in applescript.
To GUI Script Keynote, do these steps...
All the code has to go in here
<pre title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor" style="font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 10px; padding: 5px; width: 720px; color: #000000; background-color: #E0E0E0; overflow: auto">activate application "Keynote.app"
tell application "System Events"
   tell process "Keynote"
      -- insert GUI Scripting statements here
   end tell
end tell
</pre>
<pre title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor" style="font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 10px; padding: 5px; width: 720px; color: #000000; background-color: #E0E0E0; overflow: auto">click menu item "Export…"  of menu 1 of menu bar item "File"  of menu bar 1</pre>
This will click the next.. button provided the default export type is set to PPT
<pre title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor" style="font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 10px; padding: 5px; width: 720px; color: #000000; background-color: #E0E0E0; overflow: auto">click button 2 of sheet 1 of window 2
</pre>
This will click the Export button on the next window
click button 1 of sheet 1 of window 2
This piece of code can be used to set the name of the ppt file using the extracted name in the first step
<pre title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor" style="font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 10px; padding: 5px; width: 720px; color: #000000; background-color: #E0E0E0; overflow: auto">set value of text field 1 of sheet 1 of window 2 to "<string>"
</pre>
May be there is a better way out there.
Thanks for red_menace for his Script formatter script
Message was edited by: dj9027