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Tutorial: How to use the slide filter feature to custom-tailor the output presentation

Introduction

Not always is there a need to create PowerPoint slides for all data (in the Candidate Range) from Excel. This is when the slide filter feature from SlideFab pays off (also known as “Slide Exclusion Condition”). It uses a condition which is created with an Excel formula to decide whether a certain slide will be created or not.

Overview

This tutorial builds upon the previous tutorial. This was about sorting the price tags in ascending way from cheapest to most expensive. In this tutorial we will enrich the existing automation to show only the three slides with the most expensive products, still sorted by price. Everything else will be filtered out.

What is required for this tutorial on How to use the slide filter feature to custom-tailor the output presentation

We will start with the template PowerPoint presentation that SlideFab linked to the Excel workbook. It contains the Iteration Loop, the links between shapes and Excel cells as well as the sort order calculation from before. This is the Excel we will start with:

To keep only the slides with the three most expensive products, follow these steps.

Time needed: 10 minutes

  1. Create an Excel formula to make the filter decision

    – Open the PowerPoint presentation and the linked Excel file as explained before.

    In this tutorial the task is to return only the three rows with the most expensive products. The suggested formula is pretty simplistic. It is based on the LARGE function to get 3rd largest value from all prices in F3:F12. Then the price of the current product in C3 needs to be compared against the third largest value. When it is larger or equal, then a value of 1 will signal SlideFab to create the slide while a 0 does the opposite.

    =IF(C3>=LARGE(F3:F12,3),1,0)

    Of course, this formula is not so mathematically high end, in particular when all prices are the same. But for the sake of illustrating the slide filter feature it will work just fine.

    – Add the formula from above to cell C9.A screenshot depicting Excel and PowerPoint side by side, explaining how the slide filter condition in Excel needs to look like

  2. Link the filter formula with the PowerPoint slide through SlideFab

    – Click the button “Slide Linking” within the SlideFab tab in the ribbon to open the side pane.A screenshot depicting Excel and PowerPoint side by side and showing where the button to open the Slide Linking side pane is located within the PowerPoint ribbon

  3. Locate the SlideFab slide filter control

    – Select the template slide (in case it isn’t so far) and expand the “Selected Slide” control within the Slide Linking side pane.
    – Find the Slide Filter (aka “Slide Exclusion Condition”) control.A screenshot depicting Excel and PowerPoint side by side and showing where the Slide Exclusion Condition is located

  4. Add filter condition

    – Select cell C9 with the filter condition.
    – Click the crosshair icon in the “Slide Exclusion Condition” control to define the link. SlideFab will write the address of the selected cell into the control field.A screenshot depicting Excel and PowerPoint side by side and showing how to set up the silde filter with SlideFab.

  5. Now it’s time to make some slides with the slide filter in place

    We will create the slides by clicking “Make Slides” and then hitting “Start” in the window that opens. How this is done was pictured in a previous tutorial.

    The filter feature works as expected. SlideFab created the top 3 slides regarding price only. It merely omitted all the rest.A screenshot of the automatically created PowerPoint slides, sorted and filtered to the top 3 only regarding price

What comes after filtering the slides

The next tutorial in this series is a somewhat loose follow-up on this one. It is about how to let SlideFab write calculated PowerPoint slide notes.