Dynamic Grid 2: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

    Laszlo Diewald has been working as a consultant for more than 10 years now. He started his career as an employee right after his study at the Technical University of Munich. Shortly after, he decided to become self-employed as a freelance consultant. In 2017, he founded his own consultancy, with a focus on large scale projects in the financial sector. In parallel, he started working on presentaid, which was finally launched in April 2022.

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid’s new Dynamic Grid 2.

Geetesh: Laszlo, let’s start with the “why.” Dynamic Grid has been part of presentaid for some time. What led you to rebuild it as v2 instead of adding features one at a time, and was SharePoint support the main driver, or part of a larger plan?

Laszlo: Dynamic Grid started as a way to solve one problem: stop rebuilding the same PowerPoint tables from Excel every week. That worked well as a one-way, single-source tool. But as more teams adopted it, the requests started stacking up – SharePoint access, on-demand refresh, richer column types, more styling control – and every one of them touched the same underlying assumption: that a grid was built once from Excel and stayed static after that. Bolting each request onto that architecture individually would have meant patching the same weak spot again and again.

So, instead we rebuilt the engine underneath the Dynamic Grid to treat data as something live and swappable, not a one-time import. SharePoint support was the single most requested feature, but it was really the forcing function for a bigger plan: make the grid work the way our users’ data actually lives – spread across Excel, SharePoint, and pivot tables – and keep it connected instead of frozen the moment you paste it in. All the visuals that presentaid creates are pixel-perfect, PowerPoint native shapes, not just a rendered image from a source.

Geetesh: Tell us how v2 changes day-to-day work for existing presentaid users.

Laszlo: The biggest shift is the Refresh button.

Before, updating a grid meant triggering it freshly from Excel, applying the same filters, choosing the correct template and so on. Now it’s one click, inside PowerPoint, and the data’s current. For anyone whose source of truth lives in a SharePoint list rather than an Excel file, they can finally point the grid straight at it instead of exporting to Excel first as a workaround.

The new column types: flags, sliders, and bar charts replace a lot of manual conditional formatting people were doing by hand.

And being able to add several columns at once or go back and edit a saved template instead of rebuilding it, just removes friction from the parts of the job that were never the interesting part anyway.

Geetesh: For teams or individuals still creating grids by hand or relying on static Excel links, how would you describe the value of upgrading to v2?

Laszlo: The honest cost of the manual approach isn’t really the time – though that adds up – it’s the risk. A static link or a copy-pasted table is only accurate the moment you built it. Show up to a steering committee with last week’s numbers because nobody remembered to refresh the deck, and that’s a credibility problem, not just an inconvenience. Dynamic Grid V2 means the numbers in the room are the numbers in the source system, on demand, without anyone needing to remember to update anything. If you’re producing the same report on a recurring basis – status decks, trackers, board updates – that reliability compounds every single cycle.

Geetesh: Is there a trial version of presentaid including the new Dynamic Grid 2 available for readers who want to try it themselves?

Laszlo: Yes, we offer a free trial that contains all features, including the new Dynamic Grid. This trial is valid for 30 days, and no credit card is required.

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.