With our DataPoint plugin for PowerPoint, you can connect to a data store or data file like an Excel sheet, and then use that information on your slides. You can link e.g. text box A to a person’s first name, text box B to a person’s last name, and use a picture shape and link it to his or her profile picture. That can all be done very easily with our DataPoint plugin. So basically, you assign the information of the first data row to the normal PowerPoint shapes that you have on your slide.

But when you needed to show multiple persons, or projects, or hamburgers in a fast-food restaurant, then you can duplicate the slide and increment the row number of the data to 2, and so on. But that is unneeded work. That can be handled better. This request for recurring slides with data in PowerPoint, is a feature called data scrolling in our DataPoint product.

So this is how your data might look in Excel. A list of data with first names, last names and scores.

Use DataPoint to link your PowerPoint slides to any data like many users do with a so easy to use Microsoft Excel worksheet. Once you have created a link to the Excel file, you add a query that points to a given data range of your chosen data sheet. You also set a data refresh rate. Every time this timer fires, DataPoint is re-reading the data from your Excel sheet and is that way able to get in possible new data. That way we can update the text box data on your slide without stopping the slide show.

Use a normal text box and link it via DataPoint technology directly to the first name of the first data row.

Repeat this and link a text box to the last name of that data record. And finally link the score column to a 3rd PowerPoint text box, and format the number as a percentage via the DataPoint-Format tab.

Insert a picture, and choose any existing picture from your hard drive. Then use DataPoint again to link this picture box to the dynamic image with information coming from your Excel data file.

See this slide here where all shapes are dynamically linked to the first Excel data row. Every time that you open this presentation in the future, the content of these shapes is updated with the possible updated data from the Excel file.

Now we have this slide dynamically linked to the data of the first row of the Excel file. But we do not want to show the first row only. No! We want to show all data of our Excel file on this slide. So, we have a function called data scrolling, which will fulfill your request to have recurring slides.

Select the data connection on the left that you want to use for your recurring slides. In this screenshot, it is easy to choose because there is only one data connection in use on this slide. Set it to enable, and leave the step size at 1 and also leave the scroll step at 5 seconds.

Run the slide show and every 5 second you will see the next data record of your Excel file. A very easy option to see all data with little effort, and without the creation of extra slides.

For reporting purposes you can generate a snapshot presentation where a new physical slide is generated. You can now easily save and distribute this snapshot presentation to your colleagues and customers. When they use this snapshot presentation, then they are still seeing the latest version of the presentation, but they don’t need our DataPoint plugin, nor do they need access to your Excel worksheet.

Do you also want to save time and keep your data in your PowerPoint presentations up-to-date, then try out our DataPoint technology. We have a 15 day free trial for you!