Slideshow presentations and reports are a vital form of communication in business and education. In fact, an article published by Forbes in 2023 found that “a terrifying 35 million PowerPoint presentations are given each day to a combined audience of half a billion people.” Yet, creating effective, high-quality presentations can be a tedious and repetitive process. Especially when you manually create each slide. This is why so many have embraced PowerPoint Automation.
PowerPoint Automation is the use of technology to automate repetitive tasks involved in designing, creating, and updating PowerPoint presentations and reports. This includes everything from importing and inputting data, applying consistent branding, conditional formatting, and even integrating with other software tools to streamline the presentation creation process.
Key Benefits of PowerPoint Automation
- Save Time – PowerPoint Automation significantly reduces the time required to create and update presentations. Tasks like inputting data, formatting slides, inserting logos, and applying conditional formatting can all be automated, freeing up hours of manual work. This allows teams to refocus their time on value added tasks such uncovering insights or other strategic and creative activities.
- Maximising Profits – By automating routine tasks, organizations have a greater bandwidth to take on larger projects that would have otherwise been impossible. They can also offer their clients added value in their existing projects such as delivery frequency or personalization of their presentations/reports.
- Eliminate Human Error – Human errors such as incorrect data, inconsistent design and formatting logic are common when creating presentations manually. Automation allows you to pull data directly from your data source into your defined PowerPoint template instead of manually hand typing the the numbers. Automation therefore helps maintain a high level of accuracy and quality.
- Improve Consistency and Branding – Automated tools can effortlessly apply consistent themes, fonts, and colour schemes across all slides, ensuring all presentations align with brand guidelines. This is particularly useful for organizations that want to standardise their PowerPoint presentations with a consistent look and feel. Moreover, if you need to deliver reports to multiple clients you can have the report automatically update with their corporate brand identity.
- Facilitate Data Integration – PowerPoint Automation tools can integrate with other software like Excel, databases, or CRMs to pull in up-to-date data automatically. This ensures that the most up-to-date information is always presented without needing manual updates.
Key Considerations for Implementing Automation
To effectively implement PowerPoint Automation and maximise the value of your investment, it’s important to consider a number of factors. PowerPoint Automation typically involves using software, plugins, or macros to perform repetitive tasks automatically.:
- Identify Repetitive Tasks: Start by pinpointing tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming, such as updating charts, inserting new data or formatting slides. Any sort of repetition is a great candidate for automation.
- Use Pre-Defined Templates: Create or use pre-defined templates that align with your brand’s guidelines. This ensures consistency across all presentations.
- Test Automation Tools: Before fully implementing any automation tool, test it with a small team to identify any potential issues or adjustments needed.
Tools for PowerPoint Automation
There are several tools and solutions that can implement PowerPoint Automation, ranging from built-in features within PowerPoint itself, to third-party software. Some popular options include:
VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)
VBA is a proprietary programming language developed and owned by Microsoft. It allows users to integrate products in Microsoft office and create macros in PowerPoint that automate tasks such as chart generation, and inserting graphics or text etc. However, programming PowerPoint automation with VBA requires a certain level of technical expertise. For someone without prior experience, this can be daunting, requiring significant investment in training or hiring a specialist, which increases initial costs and time commitments. Furthermore, solutions like VBA macros lack flexibility. Macros are designed to perform a set of specific tasks in a predefined sequence, this results in a inflexible automation that cannot handle any variance. Many have experienced these frustrations with VBA, including our client Directions Group, and have sought to find a more user-friendly solution that offers some flexibility.
E-Tabs Enterprise
A robust solution specifically designed for report automation. E-Tabs Enterprise automates the creation of complex PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and even Google Slides/Sheets, or PDF reports, while maintaining 100% data accuracy. It’s an excellent choice for organisations that need to automate data-heavy reports.
PowerPoint Plugins
Plugins like E-Tabs Graphique and iSpring Suite sit in the PowerPoint software and can be found in the toolbar. These plugins offer advanced micro automation functionalities such as automatic chart creation and stat testing. These tools are perfect for users looking to automate micro tasks as they create their presentations and effectively act as a PowerPoint assistant. While PowerPoint automation plugins are very useful for ad-hoc PowerPoint creation, if you are looking to automate repetitive reports such as wave on wave trackers or multi-market studies, PowerPoint plugins do not have the functionality to fully automate the entire reporting process. This requires a powerful third party software that has specifically been designed with repetitive PowerPoint reporting in mind.
Final Thoughts – Embrace the Future of PowerPoint with Automation
As the businesses continue to evolve, PowerPoint Automation can help you stay ahead of the curve. From data integration and real-time updates to template automation, the possibilities are vast with PowerPoint automation. By implementing it into your workflow, businesses and individuals can save time, reduce errors, and produce more professional and impactful PowerPoint reports.
However, while PowerPoint automation offers significant advantages, some software can be complex to set up, maintain, and unable to handle data variation – especially when dealing with large-scale or highly detailed reports. This is where advanced tools like E-Tabs Enterprise come into play.
E-Tabs Enterprise is a powerful report automation solution designed to automate even the most detailed of PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Google Slides/Sheets or PDF reports quickly, all whilst maintaining 100% data accuracy. By leveraging Enterprise, you can eliminate the repetitive, manual tasks involved in report generation, allowing your team to focus on analysis and decision-making rather than data entry. Enterprise can conditionally format the output with indicators, brand logos and images positioned automatically where needed, reformat text, highlight key values and much, much more. It’s a robust solution for any organisation looking to enhance productivity and deliver high-quality presentations with minimal effort.