Show Airtable Data in PowerPoint

The Airtable service is an all-in-one collaboration platform to create and maintain lists like to bug tracking, expenses, spreadsheets, project reporting, product planning, product catalogs, and many more. You can easily share your lists and documents with others.

Use DataPoint’s JSON data provider to connect your PowerPoint presentation to Airtable’s data, so that you can show your lists in real-time on a television screen, or use it to generate an up-to-date report or overview of all your running projects or leads.

Here is a screenshot of the Airtable web page.

In order to let DataPoint connect to your Airtable data, you need to get your secret API key. To find that, log on to your Airtable account, and click the Account icon in the top right corner, then click Account from the menu list.

Look on that page for the text ‘This is your personal API key. It’s required in order to use the Airtable API.’.

Select the secret key and copy it to your clipboard.

Go to https://airtable.com/api next. Look for the Airtable list that you want to use in your PowerPoint presentation, and click the icon to open its specific details.

On that opened page, scroll down to the section named Authentication. At its right, you will find a text like:

EXAMPLE USING QUERY PARAMETER
$ curl https://api.airtable.com/v0/apptEaHgHG70kwbl8/Sources?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY

That is what we need for the JSON data provider of DataPoint. Ignore the starting text $ curl, and replace the text YOUR_API_KEY with the secret API key that we located earlier. Like so:

https://api.airtable.com/v0/apptEaHgHG70kwbl8/Sources?api_key=keyF7aR4GXumu6RTu

Start PowerPoint now and start a new presentation. Click the DataPoint option, and then click the List button of the Connections group.

From the list of available data providers, locate and select the JSON data provider. Then click the Add connection button.

Paste here the Airtable URL that we have assembled earlier and hit OK.

Then click the Add query button and select the table named fields from the table list. Note that the table names returned, can be named differently, based on the type of list that you have chosen.

Check the refresh rate and hit OK.

Voila, that is it. If everything goes according to the plan, we can now see a preview of the Airtable data. Now we can start using it.

Select or insert a new text box on your slide. With this text box selected, click DataPoint, and then Textbox button from the shapes group.

The default selected connection is fine here since we only have one in this presentation yet. Open the combobox of the Column field and select the column that you want to show in this textbox. For example the Name column here.

You can now complete your slide and bind more shapes to your data elements. When finished, you can choose to display this data-driven presentation on a dedicated television screen. Or you can generate a snapshot presentation out of it.

Note that when you would activate data scrolling here, then you can show all data rows on your screen, or see all projects in your snapshot presentation.