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Tutorial: How to write PowerPoint slide notes automatically

Introduction

Adding further information to the created presentation is easy with SlideFab. This tutorial will explain how to write PowerPoint slide notes based on data in Excel automatically.

Overview

This tutorial builds upon the previous tutorial. It was about filtering the price tags in ascending way from cheapest to most expensive. Here we will add the price list to the slide notes for all slides created.

What is required for this tutorial on How to write PowerPoint slide notes automatically

We will start with the template PowerPoint presentation that SlideFab linked to the Excel workbook. It contains the Iteration Loop and the links between shapes and Excel cells. Moreover, it contains the sort order calculation and the top 3 filtering from before. This is the Excel we will start with:

To automate writing helpful information to the slide notes, follow these steps.

Time needed: 10 minutes

  1. Setting up the Excel workbook and PowerPoint presentation in a linked way.

    – Open the PowerPoint presentation and the linked Excel file as explained before.
    – Click the button “Slide Linking” within the SlideFab tab in the ribbon to open the side pane (as explained here).
    – Select the template slide (in case it isn’t so far) and expand the “Selected Slide” control within the Slide Linking side pane (as explained here).A screenshot depicting Excel and PowerPoint side by side and showing showing the starting point based on the previous tutorial

  2. Create an Excel formula to calculate the slide notes content

    For this tutorial a nifty formula calculates the list of product names and prices for the slide nodes field. First of all, the formula uses a combination of BYROW and LAMBDA to apply a concatenation for every row r within the range E3:F12. The TEXTJOIN function does the concatenation of names and prices here. This leads to an interim result consisting of a single column of texts (which is kept in memory and not written to the worksheet). Secondly, the other TEXTJOIN combines these into one text where all the rows are separated with a new line. The colours here shall make reading simpler.

    =TEXTJOIN("
    ",TRUE,BYROW(E3:F12,LAMBDA(r,TEXTJOIN(": ",FALSE,r))))


    This formula does not depend on Master Cell C3. So the automation writes the same information to all output slides. Of course, with a dependency on the Master Cell it would have been possible to write different contents to all slide notes respectively.

    Add the formula from above to cell C12.A screenshot depicting Excel and PowerPoint side by side showing the formula used to calculate the content for the slide notes area of the created slides

  3. Link the new formula with the PowerPoint slide through SlideFab

    – Select cell C12 with the new text calculation.
    – Find the Slide Notes control.
    – Click the crosshair icon in the “Slide Notes” 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 showing how link the slide notes calculation from Excel with the SlideFab control field

  4. Now it’s time to make some slides with the slide notes definition 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 slide notes feature works as expected. SlideFab writes the pricing information into the slide notes field.A screenshot of the automatically created PowerPoint slides showing that the slide notes contains the desired information