Add right justfied tab to a textframe via VBA (Office 2007)

I'm using Access to build a series of data driven slides, mostly textframes
with special formatting. With help from a variety of individuals in the
PowerPoint community, I'm almost done. However, one of my text frames will
include some text, followed by a date on each row. What I would like to do,
is be able to embedd tabs in the text string that I am passing to a function.
The function creates the textframe and does the formatting.

So, how do I add a right justified tab formatting to the text frame, so that
the tabs that are embedded in the text between the events and the dates will
result in a left justified event names and right justified event dates.

One additional question. Is there any way (other than creating a table) to
change the background color of every other row of text in the same text
frame? I know I could build multiple textframes that only handle a single
row each, but I'm just wondering

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Dale