Introduction
The first step when using SlideFab is to make sure that the Excel file is linked to PowerPoint. This is the foundation to then automatically create slides based on the workbook.
Overview
This tutorial considers the use case that price tags are supposed to be created. The task is that for every product a slide will be created which contains both its name and its price.
What is required for this tutorial on How to link an Excel file to Powerpoint with SlideFab
Of course, SlideFab is required. For this example the free version SlideFab Lite is sufficient. Apart from this, the following is required as well.
A PowerPoint presentation serves as template
In this tutorial we will use a lean PowerPoint presentation containing one slide only as template. On this slide there are two shapes, for product name and product price respectively. In the template slide there is some dummy text in these shapes. SlideFab will overwrite this dummy text later. The template presentation also has a custom theme for the sake of illustration.
An Excel workbook will be connected with the PowerPoint template presentation
The Excel workbook used for this tutorial is lean. It contains only one worksheet. It contains product names and prices.
Follow these steps to link the Excel workbook with PowerPoint using SlideFab
Time needed: 1 minute
- Open the SlideFab tab in the PowerPoint ribbon.
- Link Excel workbook with PowerPoint presentation
Click the small chevron (down angle) button where it says “Excel: Closed”. Choose either of the three entries:
– “Select and Open Excel file” will let you browse the hard drive for the Excel file.
– “Open Excel file” will re-open an existing file, if there had been one already. If not, it has the same effect as the one mentioned before.
– “Try to use currently open Excel workbook” will try to establish a connection with the Excel workbook which was active most recently.
- Check the connection
If everything worked correctly, SlideFab will align the Excel next to PowerPoint and change the button from “Excel: Closed” to “Excel: Open”.
What comes after establishing the link between the Excel file and the Powerpoint presentation
With the link between Excel workbook and PowerPoint established, it is time for the next step in this tutorial:
Create an iteration to loop such that SlideFab creates one new slide for each of the rows containing the product data.
This might go wrong in this tutorial
Even though the steps shown above seem simple, things could go wrong anyway.
There might be Excel zombie processes hindering SlideFab from establishing the connection
Even though this sounds a little like in a B-movie, the zombie apocalypse can happen here. It means that not correctly closed Excel processes might be still in the computer memory creating problems. To stop these processes you can either use the Windows Task Manager or use the SlideFab button in the ribbon “Kill Excel” which stops the processes but does no harm otherwise.
Some piece of advice: Do not keep other Excel files open while working with SlideFab in order to avoid any interference.
The buttons might seem dead. Clicking on them has no effect
When SlideFab appears in the ribbon correctly but none of its buttons do anything, then this is typically caused by a corrupt installation. Most likely the “Unblock” checkbox was not ticked or it was installed from the zip file without extracting it first. Here you will find how it is installed correctly. Also make sure to de-install it first.