SlideFab: The most powerful Powerpoint automation tool ever built

How Excel Tables exceed Named Ranges when writing legible formulas

Creating legible Excel formulas is something which is very handy, typically. No matter whether another person or oneself needs to adopt and understand an Excel file. It can be difficult to find into the logic of an old or alien Excel file: Then even plain calculations can be hard to grasp. But there are also cases where complex workbooks are easy to understand. It depends, as always:

Imagine a classical way to make an Excel file hard to understand: Adding numerous references across worksheets to single cells. This happens quite often. Even to adapt Excel users: For example, they separate calculation sheets from a parameter sheet. Conceptually, this is a good idea, but things can get messy.

All new and totally free SlideFab 2 lite edition coming with v1.4 update

SlideFab 2 v 1.4 is an edition update which introduces an all new and totally free SlideFab 2 LITE version. The idea of this LITE version is to democratize Excel to Powerpoint automation: Power to the User! It offers all features of the full SlideFab 2 versions FLEX and SAVER. The lite version can be used to automate two shapes per slide, which will cover essential tasks, e.g. setting slide headline and some content automatically. This content can be a chart, an image, a table or even something else. With this LITE version dozens, hundreds or even thousands of slides can be fabricated automatically.

SlideFab 2 lite will do the job

In brief: SlideFab 2 lite enables you …

to fabricate hundreds or thousands of slides automatically
to bring various elements to Powerpoint based on your Excel model such as Texts, Tables, Conditional Formattings, Charts, Images and much more
to use all these additional features, such as conditioned creating, sorting, splitting into multiple files, VBA execution, etc.

This means that this free SlideFab 2 lite version will be a huge time saver for you. There is no need to use massive copy/paste anymore. No need to code your own Excel to Powerpoint macros. It is all there. Out of the box. At no cost.

No matter in which industry you are or what corporate function you fulfill. No matter for which purpose you have need to create slides. With SlideFab 2 lite you can fabricate ’em.

SlideFab 2 lite can be downloaded for free here.

Just in case

If the lite version becomes too small at some point in time, because there is a need to automate more than 2 shapes per slide, upgrading is easy. Just get a FLEX or SAVER license, enter the download key into the software, and there you go. SlideFab 2 will be unleashed from its lite limitation. And what’s best: You already know that it will be for working for you from the lite edition.

New SlideFab 2 v1.3 brings important bugfix

SlideFab 2 v1.3 is a bugfix update addressing a recent issue with the license server authentication:

While activating SlideFab license, it was signaling “no internet connection” erroneously.

What’s new in SlideFab 2 v1.3

Bug Fixes:

License authentication and update check were updated to handle server-side SSL/TLS protocol change

Automatically creating Category Trees in Powerpoint from Excel with SlideFab 2

SlideFab category tree example image for the blog post

This SlideFab 2 video shows how to create Category Trees automatically. A Category Tree is a structured visualization of corporate spend. It serves for quickly showing where most money goes in terms of categories, sub categories, suppliers and countries.

New SlideFab 2 v1.2 introduces “Scale to Fit” feature and more

SlideFab 2 v1.2 is a minor update introducing a few new features, improvements and bugfixes.

What’s new in SlideFab 2 v1.2

Features:

Added a new resize mode for shapes: “Scale To Fit” which helps if e.g. source images sometimes come in landscape or portrait mode. In these cases Scale to Fit ensures that the source image remains within the dimensions of the target shape while keeping the aspect ratio (i.e. no scaling distortions). Cf. screenshot below where Resizing is currently set to “Scale to Fit” (4-way arrow).
Added a new feature to help positioning in export mode “Indirect Shape” both vertically and horizontally (cf. screenshot below “H-Align” and “V-Align”) . It is now possible to decide between left, center, right and top, middle, bottom alignment in case the picture does not fill the whole target shape dimensions. This might particularly be the case when using resize mode “Scale to Fit”.

Improvements:

Improved performance for larger Excel files with many larger Excel tables.
Improved notification for user when shapes or charts to being exported were incorrectly addressed. SlideFab will write a notification into respective target shapes.

Bug Fixes:

Merged cells when exporting tables led to incorrect duplicate content in merged cell areas.
Sometimes custom Powerpoint presentation designs can get corrupted. In these cases SlideFab ceased making slides. This is now fixed, although the corrupted design might not work after all.

How to easily automate creating slides with a Powerpoint chart from Excel

UPDATE: Check out an even simpler and faster way to automate this example using linked charts based on the new SlideFab 2 v1.5. Never the less, the approach below is still valid.

This video is based on a scenario where lots of data in Excel is used to create numerous slides with each having a Powerpoint chart. SlideFab will create the slides and update the data ranges for the charts automatically.

Table spreading across slides

This video is based on a scenario where a table with 1,000 rows in an Excel table shall be brought to Powerpoint. As 1,000 rows are way too much for a single slide, the table shall be spread across multiple slides. Let’s call this Table Spreading. In this video the Slide Loop feature will be used to create 125 slides, where each one holds a Powerpoint table with 8 rows plus header.