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Do you spend a lot of time creating presentations?
You may find yourself filling out the same slides over and over for different customers or for monthly or weekly reports. This is where automation can help! If you are a programmer, you could set up a Google Apps script to copy the data over, but for the rest of us, there is Slideform.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to populate Google Slides using data from Google Sheets. You can quickly and easily generate multiple, customized slide decks based on data in Excel or Sheets.
What's the difference between Slideform and Google linked charts? Slideform connects text, images, and any content from sheets to slides automatically and Slideform scales with your business.
4 simple steps to automating your Google Slides
1. Create a custom Google Slides template
The first step is to create a template for your presentations. I created a simple sales report with two slides: a title slide and a body slide with some KPIs, data, and charts.
Notice the curly braces around some of the words. The curly braces {{ and }} tell us that those elements are placeholders, called “pragmas”, and they will be replaced in the final version of the presentation.
When you design your custom template, notice which fields you need to replace in different versions of the presentation. In my example, since it is a report that will be sent to several clients, I want to replace the client name each time. I also want to embed the correct, specific data for each client.
I used many pragmas in my report template. These will all be filled in with the correct information in the final presentation. For example:
- {{client_name}} - this text field will hold the client name
- {{month}} - this will have the month name
- {{image:client_logo}} - this is an image placeholder and it will be replaced by the client logo that I have stored in Google Drive
- {{fn:date}} - the date the slides are created
- {{revenue}} - the revenue in dollars for the month
- {{data:quarterly_revenue_by_cat}} - a small table of data showing revenue by product category
- {{chart:monthlyratings}} - a chart placeholder that will be filled by a chart from my Google Sheet
Slideform can fill in images and charts (from Google Sheets and other sources) automatically. I saved all my client logos in Google Drive and linked them to Slideform, so now I can select the client and the logo will be sized and cropped into the presentation automatically!
Save the template as a Google Slides presentation in your Google Drive workspace.
2. Create a Google Sheet with data for the presentation
Slideform integrates with your Google workspace and many other sources. You may already have a Google Sheet with data that you need to enter into your presentation. In this example I am creating several sales reports for different clients and I have data for each client in a Google Sheet. See one of the sheets below:
Notice that some of the data in my sheet corresponds to my template. These columns will be used to fill the pragmas in the final presentations. Other data in the sheet are for internal calculations and will not appear in the presentation.
The chart and the pre-formatted table (cells A1:D6) will be used in my slides.
3. Connect your template and data sheet in Slideform
Now you upload the slide template and the data sheet to Slideform. Just enter the Google Sheet URL under the Add Data Source menu. Then create a New Project and enter your Google Slide template URL.
The last configuration step is to connect the data to each placeholder pragma in the template. Go to Configure Data in Slideform. You can either type in the data for a pragma or you can have it auto-filled from the Google sheet or any other data source. Either way, your slides will be filled in and formatted beautifully each time you generate the presentation.
For example for the {{revenue}} text box, I want to pull the value from a specific cell in my Google Sheet. To do this, map the {{revenue}} pragma to cell "D26" in Slideform. The dollar sign and currency formatting can either be done in the spreadsheet or you can set the formatting in Slideform.
Slideform can do complex data filtering and lookups too! For more information see: How to Configure the Data Mapping
You can embed charts, text, images, number, percents and more from a variety of data sources. Save the data configuration once all pragmas are set.
4. Generate the presentation
Now that my template and form are set up, I can generate the presentation whenever I need to by clicking Generate.
All the formatting, fonts, text, and sizing is taken care of and I just get a clean, professional, and accurate presentation very quickly. And I can download it as a pdf, PowerPoint, or save it to my Google Drive. The report is fully editable so that I can add any last-minute comments or takeaways.
Now for the fun part! Automate!
Let’s generate a presentation for each my clients. All I have to do is go to my form and click Generate. I choose the client’s name and click next and the slides are ready. No more copying and pasting!
If I have more reports to send out in the coming months, I can just add those data to my sheet, go into Slideform, and generate the reports with one click. We can also schedule the reports to run automatically and email you the results.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this intro to integrating Google Sheets with Google Slides. Get in touch with Slideform at https://www.slideform.co/
