Display JSON Data in PowerPoint

Our DataPoint add-on for PowerPoint allows you to connect your presentation to a JSON file or data source, and then display this JSON information in real-time on your information screen or in your PowerPoint reports. JSON or JavaScript Object Notation is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is like a universal data exchange structure, much alike XML data. Typically JSON holds 2 pieces of informations; the definition of the data and the data itself.

Similar to a database, a JSON file could hold one or more tables. That is why you first establish a connection to the file or url, and as a second step, choose which table to use on your slides.

Click the DataPoint menu in your PowerPoint ribbon to start setting up JSON data connections. First click the List button of the Connections group in the DataPoint ribbon.

Select the JSON node and click the Add connection button.

Without going much in detail, there is a service of Yahoo available where you can get some information, based on SQL select statements. You can use e.g. this select statement:

select name from geo.countries where place="North America"

to get a list of countries that are part of North America. You can choose to return the data in JSON or XML format. For this article, choose to return the data in JSON format.

The REST Query here on the Yahoo page is the URL that we need for DataPoint. This REST query URL is the starting point for our data.

The raw (truncated) response of this call, looks like this:

{
 "query": {
 "count": 39,
 "created": "2016-04-27T07:57:34Z",
 "lang": "en-US",
 "results": {
 "place": [
 {
 "name": "Aruba"
 },
 {
 "name": "Antigua and Barbuda"
 },
 {
 "name": "Anguilla"
 },
 {
 "name": "Barbados"
 },
 {
 "name": "Bermuda"
 },
 {
 "name": "The Bahamas"
 },
 [TRUNCATED]
 ]
 }
 }
}

Hit OK to close and return to the list of connections. Click the Add query button.

You will see a list of tables that are available from the JSON connection. The number of tables, the table names and its content, really depends on what data source you are using for your data retrieval. For this JSON connection, we select the place table here. And we can change the updating interval, if needed. This updating interval will take care of the live data updates when the slideshow is running on your television or computer screen. Hit OK to confirm.

Our first JSON connection is set up and we will see a preview of the data that is returned by the JSON provider.

Now we have a connection to a JSON data prodiver. We can start showing this information in text boxes or tables. Insert a new normal table to your slide by clicking Insert, Table. Choose 1 column and 8 rows for this.

Select this new table and click the Table button of the DataPoint menu.

You can choose to use the default settings here. There is only one data connection set up in this presentation, pointing to our JSON data. So these default settings are fine here.

Click OK to dynamically link the JSON data to this table. It will always display the first 8 rows of the chosen JSON data souce.

You can make a remark here that is not all data is currently shown on the slide. The JSON data provider returned 39 rows or countries here, while our table only hosts the first 8 countries.

No problem for DataPoint. Click the Scrolling button on this slide, enable data scrolling for this connection and verify that the step size is set to 8. Hit OK to close and run your slide show.

Within the slide show, DataPoint will display the first 8 data rows for 5 seconds. Then it will display the next 8 rows; rows 9 to 16 and so on, till all the information of the data source is shown.