XL-Addin: Conversation with Aurelian Laic

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Aurelian Laic has worked in software development and IT consultancy since 1997, creating many business and enterprise applications. He’s been working as a consultant for large companies listed in DAX and M-DAX and has been writing articles for various security magazines. He is now the owner of a software company that creates XL-Addin.

In this conversation, Aurelian talks about how XL-Addin can help PowerPoint users.

Geetesh: Tell us about your XL-Addin product and how it works with PowerPoint.

Aurelian: XL-Addin is an Excel add-ins suite designed for business and enterprise use.
All components are designed for business users, not experts or technologists, but the results will look as if made by experts. The main purpose of XL-Addin is to improve productivity by spending less time involved in tasks that could be easily automated.

One component of XL-Addin is Export to PowerPoint, a feature that automates the export of Excel ranges into new or existing PowerPoint presentations. Export to PowerPoint allows users to transform Excel workbooks into professional PowerPoint presentations with progress bars, content slide, navigation, etc., using existing presentations or new presentations.

Geetesh: What are the scenarios in which this Excel add-in can be useful to PowerPoint designers — how does it make their work easy and their workflow faster?

Aurelian: XL-Addin is helpful, especially when you regularly have to create or update PowerPoint presentations using data stored in Excel workbooks (financial or budgeting data, monitor HR changes, sales data, project management data).

Normally, this operation is done manually, by copying the ranges and charts from Excel and then pasting them to PowerPoint slides. But this operation is time-consuming, and the quality of the export is poor in many cases.

By using XL-Addin the copy/paste procedure became totally automated, and the user can create large presentations in less than a minute. For exporting to PowerPoint, XL-Addin uses a different approach: it saves the ranges/charts as images, process them and then inserts the images into slides. This technique assures a good compression level, keeping the quality of the images very high.

Furthermore, the user is able to set exactly the format, position, and sizes for each exported range. A special feature of the PowerPoint exporter allows the user to visually adjust the position and size using a preview of the slide where the export will be done. Anything can be customized: the user can create custom presentations by selecting the slides to be exported with just a few mouse clicks; the slides/page order can be changed very easily, the picture format, sizes, and positions for all slides can be adjusted/changed quickly. All settings for export are saved and stored in the workbook for later use.

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