Friday, 2 p.m.: 40 projects, 40 status slides. Again.
The project data is maintained — in Excel, in the PPM tool, in the project leads' status updates. Yet every week someone sits down and hand-builds the slides for steering committee, portfolio board, and management: recoloring status lights, redrawing milestones, retyping budget figures.
That is not project steering. That is formatting work — and it eats exactly the time the PMO needs for content.
2 working days
- Hours of manual slide upkeep per reporting cycle — every single week if you report weekly
- Status lights, trend arrows, and milestones set by hand: inconsistent across projects, error-prone in front of committees
- Last-minute data change on reporting day? Start over.
10 minutes
- Your project list in Excel is the single source — it drives every slide: one per project, portfolio overviews, management summary
- Status lights, trend arrows, and conditional elements are set by the data, not by the intern
- New data on reporting day: regenerate every report in minutes, in your unchanged corporate template
From client projects
Global food corporation, portfolio of 40+ projects: One one-pager per project per month — status, milestones, next steps — with about 35 data links per slide (text, charts, conditional shape deletion). The data comes from three sources, merged with Power Query, almost no Excel formulas involved. Before: 2 working days per month of manual slide work for the roughly 40 slides. Today: about 10 minutes — data update included, at the push of a button.
We don’t name clients — NDAs. In a first call we are happy to walk you through anonymized examples.
How a project runs
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Kickoff (video call)
We look at your project list, your report formats, and your committee structure.
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Build — you pick the mode
Co-creation: we build the Excel model together over screen sharing; your PMO team owns it afterwards. Or done-for-you: I build independently between short check-ins — minimal time on your side.
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Dress rehearsal
One full reporting cycle with real data, fine-tuning of status logic and layout.
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Production
Your PMO generates the reports at the push of a button — every cycle from now on.
Typical project: two weeks. No coding on your side. The Excel model and PowerPoint template are standard files and they are yours — your reporting logic stays visible and editable at all times.
Reporting Automation Setup
from €4,900
Includes the Excel model, template linking, status/condition logic, on-the-fly training for your team, and a SlideFab license for year one.
Frequently asked questions
- Our data lives in a PPM tool (Jira, Planview, MS Project …), not in Excel.
- Not a blocker: SlideFab works from the Excel export. Practically every PPM tool exports to Excel or CSV — that export becomes your reporting source.
- We have several data sources.
- The typical case — the example above had three. Power Query in Excel merges and shapes the sources; the reporting model then needs almost no classic Excel formulas and stays easy to maintain.
- Each committee gets a different slide format.
- That is exactly where this approach shines: from the same data, SlideFab fills different templates — detail slides for the steering committee, a one-pager for management, a portfolio view for the board.
- Does the status-light logic really work automatically?
- Yes. Conditional elements appear or disappear based on the data — red light, trend arrow, escalation note. You define the rules once in the Excel model.
- Can't AI / Copilot do this by now?
- AI is great at drafting — and that is exactly the difference: it produces approximate slides. Reporting needs exact ones: every number traceable to the source, every element pixel-true to your corporate design, and exactly reproducible next cycle. SlideFab is deterministic — same data, same result, zero hallucination. And confidential figures don't belong in a chat window; SlideFab runs entirely on your machine. AI helps you think — SlideFab runs production.
- Someone could script this for us in VBA or Python.
- They could — with well-known follow-up costs: scripts are tied to their author (developer leaves, script dies), they break on every template change, and as custom software they often need IT approval. A SlideFab model is Excel: maintained by the very people who own the reporting, no programming, no deployment. More on the scripting route: Creating PowerPoint from Excel using VBA.
- Confidentiality?
- Everything runs locally on your machines. No cloud, no data transfer. NDA on request, of course.