How do you control whether you want your data-enabled PowerPoint to advance slides manually instead of jumping automatically to the next slide?
Data-enabled presentations are normal for our DataPoint plugin. You can link your slides to data and show data in real time. Most presentations do have multiple slides because you have more than one thing to show. At restaurants, you have more than one menu option. At a shoe shop, you show more than one pair of shoes. So multiple slides are very normal.
The same with data reporting, you probably have more data to show, than you can show on one slide. For that purpose, we already have a great DataPoint feature included from the beginning of DataPoint. This feature is data scrolling that allows you to show all data on one single slide design. So when you run your slideshow, but with data scrolling active, then you can run your slideshow and show all data in sequence so that it looks like you have multiple slides.
That feature we already have in DataPoint from our humble beginnings, some 20 years ago. And that was and still is a great time saver for everyone using datapoint for their presentation automation.
To enable data scrolling and show all data on a slide, you need to activate data scrolling on that slide via the Scrolling button of DataPoint.
Enable data scrolling for the connection that is in use on this slide and set the step size and step time. The step size indicates the number of rows that you want to step over. When you show only one row of data on your slide, then your step size is most likely 1. When you use a table with 10 rows on it, then you probably want to set the step size to 10 so that you can show rows 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 and so one.
The step time is the number of seconds that a block is shown. So when you set the step time to 20, then each block of data or rows, is shown for 20 seconds and then automatically going to the next block.
That all works pretty fine. All your data is shown automatically in blocks and advanced automatically. This is a typical behavior what you want to use e.g. at train stations. You want to show all trains on one screen and when your number of trains does not fit on that one slide, then you want to alternate your train info in blocks, but still show all train info. In that case, you show your blocks of data after each other, and every sequence is shown for n seconds.
When you have shown all data, the slideshow is automatically going to the next slide.
But there are some events for screens where you do not want to advance automatically. We recently had a customer of DataPoint who wanted to use PowerPoint to display real-time game results but did not want to advance automatically to the next slide after the last data row. He wanted to scroll through the data and show all data on one slide, but not move to the next slide when the last data row was shown. He wanted to repeat the data on that same slide.
For that event, he was showing game results, but they had a slide per category and he wanted to move to the next category or slide when all games were completed. With the old behavior of datapoint, this was not possible so he filed a change request.
We listen carefully to our customers and many of our powerful new features have been suggested by our creative customers. So we began work on PowerPoint advance slides control functionality using DataPoint.
We added a new option to our data scrolling form. That option is called ‘Advance to next slide at end of data’. To be backwards compatible with the old scrolling behavior, we set this checkbox to true.
In case you want to click to move manually to the next slide, just uncheck that option and you can run your slideshow with the new option.
So you can show one slide with scrolling data over all games or participants and the data will repeat forever on that slide without leaving the slide. When you decide that all games are played, then you click to advance to the next slide where you can show all games and participants of the next category or age group.
This new feature is available in DataPoint for everyone. If you want to build your own game result displays, then try out DataPoint 15 days for free.
