A reader asked how to convert an Excel workbook into a PowerPoint presentation where the first column was a title page and the next two columns were the subtitles.
This sounded to me like a Mail Merge problem, and indeed Word proved a bridge to getting this done. This is a circuitous solution but avoids using any VBA code.
The above video is a walk-through of the below steps.
Download the exercise file here.
Select file to merge
In this lesson it will be the above exercise file.
Put a copy of this file on your Desktop or somewhere else accessible.
Then open a new Word document (no need to save this one) and set up a new Mail Merge by selecting Mailings from the home ribbon.
Under Select Recipients, there is an option to “Use an Existing List.” Select this option and navigate to your “exercise.xlsx” workbook. This workbook does contain headers, so you can leave that option checked on.
Insert fields to merge
This essentially loaded the workbook data into the Word doc. We will now tell Word where to insert these fields into our mail merge. We will do that by navigating to “Insert Merge Field,” also on the Mailings tab, and clicking on each of our three fields.
Apply Header styles to merge fields
For our finished product, we want the first field, Name, to be the header, and the other two fields to be sub-headings. So we will use Word’s Heading Styles menu to set this up:
Finally… we are ready to merge.
Head to “Check for Errors” on the Mailings tab and select the last option, “Complete the merge without pausing. Report errors in a new document.”
You will get a Word document with each page reporting each row of the Excel workbook.
Save the Word document.
Note – if you are having trouble with the next step, try saving the document as an RTF file and then loading to PowerPoint.
To PowerPoint!
Ok, now we will go to PowerPoint. Under “New Slide” on the Home tab, one of the very last options says “Slides from Outline.” Well, hey! We made an outline in Word! So go ahead and select that file, wherever you saved it. Make sure that file is closed, or PowerPoint will return an error.
BOOM! We’ve got a mail-merged PowerPoint slideshow, and we didn’t need any coding.
I hope this helped!
This was awesome and exactly what I needed! A much better option for me than writing a VB script or a macro. Thank you!!!
Great, thanks for reading, Scott!
Perfect. Saved my life!
Great, thanks for reading!
Thank you – huge time saver for sure https://twitter.com/vincedeon/status/1328071156423819264
Glad to hear it Vince! Best wishes for your project.
This is great! Is there a way to have several groups of data on a slide, as opposed to each set of data being on a separate slide? Thank you!
Thank you for reading Abby — from what I am seeing each slide is meant to have only one “Title.” So when we merge in the outline, the “Header 1” becomes that one and only one title. There may be a workaroud but it may need to be done with another tool.
Thank you! It’s good to at least have this capability!
I think I love you.
🥰 Well isn’t that nice! Glad to help.
Is there a way to format the text so that it isn’t bulleted in PPT?
How can I apply a background design to all the slides?
Hi Maura, thanks for reading and sorry for the very long delay.
You may be able to adjust those settings within the PowerPoint deck itself. Here is Microsoft’s tutorial on changing background slides: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-background-of-your-slides-in-powerpoint-for-the-web-6927cd06-5a5b-483e-9d98-6e270df45700
Hey – this is a life-saver for a task I am just about to do! One question though, is there a way to format the slide outline in a more advanced way? for example, rather than just a title then bullets underneath could I place multiple pieces of information about each person, on each slide, in a table? If I just created it in a table format in word, would that pull over to PPT?
Hi Stacey, thanks for reading and good to hear.
I could be wrong but I don’t think that running a table through mail merge will work, at least in this case. The outline structure is pretty strict about the type of text you put into it, e.g. you’re not able to upload images in it.