Making your (Power)Point

Over the last year or so several customers have asked about the ability to export XLCubed reports directly into PowerPoint.  They were doing this manually as part of regular monthly reporting cycles, and wanted to automate what was a fairly tedious process, and to save time. We took these requests on board and are pleased to announce PowerPoint integration as a new feature in v9.1.

Enable this functionality in Workbook Options > PowerPoint settings.

Check the box to ‘Allow save to PowerPoint slideshow’ and add your slide(s).  Each slide consists of an Excel range within the report and you can change the order of your slides by dragging this icon:

You can add as many slides as required. You now simply publish the report and then from within XLCubed Web select the Download PowerPoint icon from the bank of icons on the top right of the screen:

It’s as simple as that!

A default PowerPoint template is included.  This is a standard PowerPoint file with a Master Slide to use when any new slides are created in the export.

If you have company-specific PowerPoint formats you can also set up your own PowerPoint templates, complete with Master slides, in the Repository folder on your Web server:

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XLCubedWeb\Repository\__xlcubed__\__powerpointtemplates__

There are two types of layouts:

XLCubedNoTitle – for slides that do not require a title.  The slide must contain a ‘content’ placeholder that can be positioned and resized to the layout needed.

XLCubedWithTitle – for slides that need a title.  The slide must contain ‘content’ and ‘text’ placeholders that can be positioned and resized.

Check the Template box in Workbook options > PowerPoint settings to browse to the Repository and select the PowerPoint file to be used.

PowerPoint integration also supports Multi-Sheet web printing.  This is a really simple way to include a number of slides in your PowerPoint presentation.  For example, say we wanted to analyse and compare revenue across a number of sales regions over a period of time.

With this functionality enabled a user would be able to create separate slides showing sales revenue for the each of selected regions over each of the selected periods with the selections being made via slicers at the time the PowerPoint is created.

Multi-Sheet Web printing is enabled through Workbook Options.

There is more information on this here:

https://help.xlcubed.com/Multi-sheet_Web_Printing

PowerPoint is also available as an output option within scheduling, in addition to PDF and Excel.

To see how easy PowerPoint integration is to use, take a look at our YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaQiBs5_R-4&t=62s

As always we would love to hear your feedback!