In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a batch of slide decks that are automatically...
Welcome to Slideform!
Creating presentations manually can take a lot of time. You may find yourself creating the same slide decks over and over for different customers or for monthly or weekly reports.
Slideform puts your presentations on auto-pilot!
Slideform automation pulls the data you need into your customized presentation template on your schedule. Slideform works by taking in two elements:
- a slide deck template
- data sources with charts, data, images, text, and other content
A Simple Example
When you initially log into Slideform, you will see an example project in your workspace. Let's walk through the example.
This card represents a Slideform project that consists of a slide deck template and the matching data elements that will complete the presentation.
1. The slide deck template
Click Configure Data to see the template and manage the project. The Configure Data page has tabs across the top for the project settings. You can see all the details here: Project Settings.
Below the project name, tags, and description you will see a thumbnail image of the slide template and a link to the template. This template is a Google Slide deck, but you can also use PowerPoint. Other advanced template formats include Google Docs and Google Sheets.
Click the link to the template to open it. If you make edits to the template, you can click Refresh to bring in the updates. For details about the template see: How to create a template.
There are three slides in this template. The template has elements enclosed in curly braces that serve as placeholders for content you will insert from the data source. The chart and data placeholders are contained in shapes. Read more about setting up your placeholders here: Configure the data mapping
Now that we've examined the template, let's connect a data source.
2. Connect a data source
There are many types of data that you can connect to Slideform. For details, see: How to connect a data source.
For this example, we will use a dashboard from Looker Studio, but the process is the same for any supported dashboard platform (Looker, Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio, Hubspot dashboards).
For an example with a Google Sheet as the data source see: Google Sheets example.
Go to Data Sources on the main menu and add the integration of your choice. Once you have connected the data source and it has been indexed by Slideform, you will see the data source listed on your Data Sources page.
On your data sources page, the name of the data source is a link, so you can access the data source for reference. Click the Configure button to examine the data elements and send them to your project.
There are three types of data elements imported from the dashboard:
- charts: images of all the charts and graphs from the dashboard. This may also include scorecard objects and tables of data that appear in your dashboard.
- tables: the data behind each chart, graph, or table, presented in a tabular format
- metrics: the metrics section exposes the filter names and values from your dashboard
Select a worksheet from the dropdown and click Preview to see all the charts that Slideform has indexed from that page. To preview only one chart, you can select the chart specifically. You can also apply any filters from your dashboard to the data here. It may take some time to pull in the filtered data.
The chart names have been assigned by Slideform. To change a name, just click on the name and type. Then press enter to save the new name. You can favorite a chart with the star icon. This can be useful to remember which charts you want to use in your report.
Preview and renaming works the same for data tables as well.
To send the chart or table to your project, click the send icon. In the popup modal, select the project and the placeholder (pragma) where you want to place this chart. You can match all the placeholders in your template to content this way, or do the matching from the Configure Data page.
Let's return to the project to finish up!
3. Mapping data to the template
Click Configure Data on the project card.
On the Configure Data page, below the template you will see blue boxes that represent each of the placeholders.
If you sent a chart or table to the project already, you will see that information populated here. For any elements that still need to be mapped to data, follow the instructions here: Mapping data to your project .
Let's walk through {{chart:metric1}} as an example. 
Click Preset a Value, then select the data source, worksheet, and chart from the dropdowns. Use the star button to view only those charts that you have marked as favorites.
You can set the anchor position of the chart within its placeholder, apply filters to the data, and preview the chart.
Click Save at the bottom of the page to save the data mapping.
4. Generate your slide deck
To create your slide deck, click Generate on the project card. You will need to fill in or skip any placeholders that have not been preset.
A preview of the slides will be generated on the next screen. Click to save the output as Powerpoint (Download File) or Google Slides (Upload).
The results will be available on the project page under All Downloads.
Here's the output for our Simple Report.
Additional Capabilities:
You can specify a filename for the output, set email notifications, disable previews, and more in the Project Settings. For details, visit Configure Project Settings.
To set a schedule to generate the slides, go to Schedule. For details see, How to set a schedule for recurring presentations.
