slider bar for text in powerPoint 2011

I take it you don't adhere to any of the admonitions about putting too much text on a slide (see Rule #2).

No matter. PowerPoint pretty much lets you do anything you can think of.

A cross-platform solution to your request involves putting a slider control onto a UserForm. Actually, you might put two controls. a horizontal control and a vertical control, to move the text box in any direction. Have code perform the work of displaying the proper content based on the variable values obtained from the userform slider controls. 

PowerPoint lets you make enormous text boxes that spill above and below, as well as to the left and the right of visible slide area. Personally, I find the concept a bit unwieldy, as I forget all the stuff I put into large text boxes, but it does work. It sounds like you might be able to put this ability to work for you.

I take it you don't adhere to any of the admonitions about putting too much text on a slide (see Rule #2).

No matter. PowerPoint pretty much lets you do anything you can think of.

A cross-platform solution to your request involves putting a slider control onto a UserForm. Actually, you might put two controls. a horizontal control and a vertical control, to move the text box in any direction. Have code perform the work of displaying the proper content based on the variable values obtained from the userform slider controls. 

PowerPoint lets you make enormous text boxes that spill above and below, as well as to the left and the right of visible slide area. Personally, I find the concept a bit unwieldy, as I forget all the stuff I put into large text boxes, but it does work. It sounds like you might be able to put this ability to work for you.

Thanks for your response (Rule two does NOT apply for my use) 

Your response gave me hope that this can be done, but does not tell me how to do it. 

~ how do I use a cross-platform(?) to put a slider control onto a UserForm(?).

~ I would need step by step directions - or if you can direct me to a "how to site" 

Thanks, 

It sounds like you have never done anything with Visual Basic for Applications, the built-in extensibility programming language in PowerPoint.

I'll start with a couple small book excerpts to show you how to display the Visual Basic Editor and what it does:

Display and Navigate the VBE Interface in Office 2011 for Mac

and

How to Code with the VBE in Office 2011 for Mac

Once you've seen the editor, know that code runs in "modules" that are like word processing documents for code. Userforms are windows that can have controls on them. 

Because Office has been around almost 30 years, there are thousands of examples how to code in VBA on the internet. So poke around and do some searching on things like

VBA userform example

The slider control's official name is scroll bar This page explains how to work with controls on a userform in Excel, PowerPoint's userforms work the same, except you don't have worksheets, you have slides and slide objects to work with.