In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a batch of slide decks that are automatically...
Slide decks are the standard tool for reporting and sharing results. Slideform can help automate your reporting tasks by automatically filling in the data on your slides from Google Sheets or Excel.
See my previous post on How to automatically generate Google Slides from Google Sheets to get started.
But we can do so much more than just link a specific cell value to a specific slide. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create a presentation or report in Google Slides that pulls data from more than one Google Sheet.
My example presentation is a year-end report from a vacation rental company. The report includes 8 slides with data on the performance of a specific rental property. The data will be pulled from 2 different data sheets stored in Google Drive.
There are 3 elements we need to assemble to get started.
1. Report template
I created a Google Slides presentation with the styling, colors, and layout of the information I want to see in my reports. Each data element is represented with a data pragma, denoted by curly braces . These pragmas will be replaced by the data values from my data sheets.
For example, see slide 3 below, which shows the total number of bookings for this property over the year.
Template with placeholders:
Template filled in with data:
Each slide in the report has different data pragmas that will be filled with the rental performance data.
I also included image pragmas for the business logo and also for the staff member's photo. You can read more on image pragmas in my next blog post. :)
2. Data sheet with rental performance data
We store our rental performance data in Google Sheets. This summary sheet has a column to identify each property (propertyname), and then the data about that property are found in the different columns. Not all the columns will appear in the report.
3. Company directory data sheet
My report template also includes information on the staff member who manages each rental property. We don't store this info in the same sheet as the rental data. But with Slideform, I can easily link this data to my report.
The company directory includes the staff member name and contact info as well as the propertyname field. We will use propertyname to link the two data sheets together.
Let's automate!
Now I upload the slide template to Slideform and link the two data sheets by sharing them through Google Drive.
I configure the template to be filled in with data from the correct cell in each of the two data sheets. For example, slide 5 shows the total number of nights occupied. The data is pulled from column total_nights_occ of the rental performance data sheet. The query section allows us to auto-populate this value based on the propertyname.
To generate the report for any of my rental properties, all I have to do is select the property name from a dropdown. I can then export the report as powerpoint file, Google Slides, or even a pdf I can email to the owner.
Check out the full tutorial here:
