SlideFab: Conversation with Jens Hühn

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    Dr. Jens Hühn obtained a MSc.-equivalent degree in CS and a PhD in Machine Learning at Marburg University, Germany. He worked for several years as a data analytics consultant at A.T. Kearney. In 2016 he started the development of SlideFab. Since then, he has been working as an analytics consultant, software developer and entrepreneur. One of his most recent projects is ACOMERA, a surveying software for psychological safety at work, which of course creates its result slides automatically.

In this conversation, Jens talk about SlideFab.

Geetesh: SlideFab, your PowerPoint add-in is a time-saver that automates the process of mass-producing slides from Excel sources. What motivated you to create this add-in? Also, tell us more about SlideFab.

Jens: Basically, the idea of SlideFab is rooted in my dislike for doing repetitive, uninspiring work. Creating lots of PowerPoint slides with copy & paste from Excel falls into this category. And my hypothesis to start SlideFab was and still is that more people feel the same way. So, my ambition with SlideFab has been to make life a little bit easier for these people.

The concept for SlideFab originated when I had been working as an analytics consultant in 2015. Quite often data-driven slides had to be created in a repeatable fashion. For example, the very same slides with the very same charts had to be created, but for different companies with different numbers and different titles.

Back then it had been best practice to write a little piece of VBA code, custom-tailored to the Excel workbook and the PowerPoint template slide. This was more efficient than creating these slides manually, of course. But at the same time it was also a pity as all VBA code ended up in the trash bin afterwards. This led to my hypothesis that some reusable code, which is merely configured instead of changed, might achieve the same but faster.

In 2018 the first SlideFab version was an Excel add-in which imported a PowerPoint template presentation. Technically, it worked but it was very cumbersome to use. The breakthrough idea was to put Excel and PowerPoint side-by-side and create a WYSIWYG-like (what you see is what you get) interface.

So, users could just select a shape in a PowerPoint template presentation, select a range in Excel and then simply use the SlideFab interface to connect both. The new SlideFab 2 was ready in 2019. In comparison to writing custom VBA code, this was a significant simplification.

Today, SlideFab contains many different features and functionalities. At the core of it all, is the iteration loop feature, which is comparable to mail merge. In each loop cycle SlideFab puts into one special Excel cell the next entry of some candidate list.

Formulas which refer to this special cell will then recalculate, and charts, texts or tables will update accordingly within Excel. Then the automation of SlideFab creates another copy of the template presentation and fills in the updated contents from Excel.

Once the iteration loop ends, there will be one or more output slides for each of the candidates. Besides, the template presentation can have any kind of theme, including custom ones to respect corporate identity.

The key formula to build such an automation is XLookup (or VLookup or Index/Match). With these formulas custom information for the current loop cycle can be extracted from any source data table. But of course, stronger Excel skills help to get the most out of SlideFab. Connecting Excel ranges and PowerPoint shapes is a piece of cake once the Excel logic is built. Automating to write texts, to create tables (incl. conditional formats), to create/update charts is simple.

Several SlideFab features were inspired from the challenges its users had to face. So, it also contains plenty of advanced features available like scaling shapes or conditionally removing shapes or excluding slides or decomposing into multiple files.

Often when users face challenges or have no time to build the automation logic themselves, they can reach out and we can start co-creating the workbook, the template presentation and the SlideFab setup. Once these are finished, running the SlideFab automation is as simple as playing a CD.

Geetesh: How can one try out SlideFab? Is a trial version available?

Jens: SlideFab contains many features, way more than most users could try out in a limited time frame. Accordingly, there is a free “Lite” version of SlideFab available which contains all features with no time restriction. The only difference between the Lite version and the Full version is that Lite is limited to two automation items per template slide, e.g., for a title and a table. For some users the free Lite version might be fully sufficient.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.