Customers all over the world use our DataPoint plugin for PowerPoint to run a real-time slideshow with up-to-date news, weather, key performance indicators, messages, etc. Some want to add inspirational or funny quotes to this slideshow to motivate personnel. Let’s see how they can do that with our DataPoint and PowerPoint.
First, you download our DataPoint plugin. After installation, the new DataPoint item is visible in the PowerPoint menu. Click the List button of the Connections group and see a list of data providers that you can use with DataPoint.
We are going to get a daily random quote from a website in the form of an RSS feed. RSS feeds are typically used to exchange news articles or the blog articles of a website. In this article, we use BrainyQuote or this direct URL to the quotes RSS feed: https://www.brainyquote.com/link/quotebr.rss
Select the News (RSS) data provider from the list and click the Add Query button.
Paste the URL at the top and click OK to close. We are good with the proposed default values.
You get a preview of the daily quotes that we got from that website and now have this available as an in-memory dataset. We can start now using that information on our PowerPoint slides.
Select an existing textbox or insert a new textbox on your slide. Select it and click DataPoint, textbox option. This opens the DataPoint property form that we can use to bind a text box on our slide to a specific value retrieved from our dataset earlier.
At the first option, select our one and only data connection being our quotes query. Click the Column Listbox and choose to link this textbox to the Description column. Row number 1 is fine for the first quote. You could use other textboxes on other slides to link it to the other quotes from the list. Hit OK to close.
Now run your slideshow and probably you want to add more slides with other (company) information. Run the presentation as a slideshow or use our iPoint solution to schedule and send out the presentation to screens throughout the factory.
