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Updated Nov 15, 2025
What is Slideform?
Slideform is an AI-enabled automation platform that links data from BI dashboards to reports, slides, and documents. You use your own template, and Slideform fills in the data. You can even create customized charts and text insights for your reports with Slideform AI.
In this tutorial, we'll walk through a Slideform automation example in four simple steps:
Read on for all the details, or watch the video demo.
Getting Started
When you initially log into Slideform, you will see an example project in your workspace. Let's walk through the example.
1. The data source
Slideform can pull in charts and data from most popular BI dashboards and database platforms. You can check the list of supported data sources. This example project uses a demo dashboard provided by Slideform, but the process is similar for any supported data source.
Go to Data Sources on the main menu to add and manage data sources. Here's our example data source:
Click the Configure button to preview the data elements that are available for embedding in your presentation. For more information about managing your data sources, see Manage Data Sources.
To add a new data source, go to Data Sources > Add Data Source. There you will see a card for each supported data source. Click Add Integration to get started. For help, see How to Connect a Data Source.
2. The slide deck template
Click Configure on the project card to see the presentation slides and manage the project.
The project name, tags, and description are at the top of the page. In the next section, is a thumbnail image of the slide template and a link to the template. The example template is a Google Slide deck, but you can also use PowerPoint. Other template formats are also available.
The template is a repeatable presentation with placeholders for content to be pulled in from data sources. The template specifies the layout of content, the colors, formatting, and styling of the presentation results.
Click the link to the template to open it in Google Slides. If you make edits to the template, you can click Refresh to pull in the updates. For details about the template see: How to create a template.
There are 13 slides in this template, but only slides 5-8 have dynamic content that will be updated by Slideform. Placeholders, or "pragmas", show where content will be inserted. The names of the pragmas are enclosed in curly braces, {{ }}. The chart, image, and table pragmas are contained in shapes.
Each of these slides has an example data pragma that will be filled in from the data source. For example on Slide 5, the text {{avg customer score}} will be replaced with a number from the connected data source.
Dynamic charts, tables, and images are demonstrated on slides 6, 7 & 8.
From the Configure page you can also set the associated data sources, output settings, schedule, team access, and other settings. Find all the details here: Project Settings.
3. Match data to the template
On the project Configure page, below the template link, you will see a blue box for each pragma.
Let's walk through {{chart:chart1}} as an example.
The data to fill this pragma has already been selected. To configure the data, we select the data source, worksheet, and chart from the dropdowns. We also can set the anchor position of the chart within its placeholder, apply filters to the data, and preview the chart.
Take a look at the other pragmas to see how a table, image or text value can be pulled in from the data source.
Read more about setting up pragmas here: Configure the data mapping
4. Generate the presentation
Once the pragmas are matched to data, we can create the presentation results. Click Generate on the project card.
A preview of the slides will appear on the next screen. If the preview looks good, click Get Final Results to save the output as a Powerpoint file or Google Slides. The results will then be listed on the home page under Results.
Here's the output for our example.
Additional Capabilities:
You can specify a filename for the output, set email notifications, disable previews, and more in the Project Settings. For details, visit Project Settings.
To set a schedule to generate the slides, go to Schedule. For details see, How to set a schedule for recurring presentations.
Have questions? We're here to help. Contact support@slideform.co for help setting up your automation.
