Practice: Create a Slide Editor

Creating presentations can quickly become a Copy-and-Paste type of activity. One of the examples that this course covered was bringing data from spreadsheets into slides.

How would you use presentation automation in your context?

1 Like

Hello @Bianca.Dragu!

It seems that you have trouble getting an answer to your question in the first 24 hours.
Let us give you a few hints and helpful links.

First, make sure you browsed through our Forum FAQ Beginner’s Guide. It will teach you what should be included in your topic.

You can check out some of our resources directly, see below:

  1. Always search first. It is the best way to quickly find your answer. Check out the image icon for that.
    Clicking the options button will let you set more specific topic search filters, i.e. only the ones with a solution.

  2. Topic that contains most common solutions with example project files can be found here.

  3. Read our official documentation where you can find a lot of information and instructions about each of our products:

  4. Watch the videos on our official YouTube channel for more visual tutorials.

  5. Meet us and our users on our Community Slack and ask your question there.

Hopefully this will let you easily find the solution/information you need. Once you have it, we would be happy if you could share your findings here and mark it as a solution. This will help other users find it in the future.

Thank you for helping us build our UiPath Community!

Cheers from your friendly
Forum_Staff

Creating a bot for power point creation was a lot of fun! In my consulting work, I can use this approach to save my clients time with better accuracy.

If I were a manager there, I’d ask the question “why are we spending all this time on PowerPoints? Can’t we just show the info from the source(s)?”

Overall a good exercise on how to use the different activities for the automation. However, I have 2 questions relating to the practice exercise:

  1. When creating pivot tables, what will be the procedure if we have different number of rows in each excel table? In that scenario, can we still use For Each Excel Sheet Activity?

  2. Within the solution, can someone explain me why did we nest the PPT activity?

Hi @Shobhit_Bhatnagar ,

  1. For variable number of rows in an Excel table, you can just specify the columns like : “CurrentSheet.Range(“F:G”)” and it will take account of all rows within the specified columns.

  2. PPT resources are nested because the “Copy Paste Slide” activity needs source PPT (template) and destination PPT. That’s why, both PPT are opened by this way.

Hope it can help,

Stieban

Hi,

A little question. In the given solution, companies in the PPT are reverse-ordered compared to the Excel file sheets order.

How can you change the workflow to keep the excel file sheets order (copy-pasting slides one after the other instead of adding them to the beginning) ?

Thank you,

Stieban

Hey Stieban, for the Copy Paste Slide I used CurrentIndex1 for the first slide, CurrentIndex2 for the second slide and CurrentIndex*3 for the third slide. I also used these same references for pasting the charts and the tables.

At runtime, there are no slides, so slide 1 through 3 are the Soylent slides. On the next iteration, slide 2 (21) is the Acme slide 1 and slide 4 (22) is the Acme slide 2 and slide 6 (2*3) is the Acme slide 3.

This methodology produces a deck with slides 1-4 for each of the companies in the same order as the Excel for slide 1 of the template. Slides 5-8 for slide 2 of the template and slides 9-12 for slide 3 of the template.

Hope this helps!

This was a great practice, it was fun building this robot . I can already see how i can use this to create Power point presentation form the data in the multiple emails we get for different campaigns and groups

Hi, I also find it really interesting building power point from multiple emails. I never thought I would be able to do something awesome like this.

This could be useful for relaying information visually from an Excel source if it had to occur on a regular basis, e.g. at info-exchange meetings about resources or projects.

Hi all, the only thing I didn’t get was: how does the images in pptx are named as the placeholders?, I mean, the Alt text is not been used here. So, how does Uipath knows which image is the named “New Bussiness/Upsell Chart PH”?
Thank you :slight_smile:

"

Good practice - forgotten the need to nest two Powerpoint resources within each other. Resolved y=by troubleshooting and reviewing the Robot Path pdf.

Hi, interesting challenge!

I am having trouble in populating de charts. The robot does de charts for de first worksheet, then it moves to the second worksheet and does the first chart and then it stops. I get the error :

     "Insertar gráfico: Devuelto error HRESULT E_FAIL de una llamada a un 
      componente COM."

Does someone please know where this is coming from ?

Hi Marc,

I have that same problem, and I’ve also narrowed it down to the insertion of the pie chart, but I still don’t understand why it’s failing. I’m running StudioX2022.12.0.
What is even weirder is that if I disable the column chart insertion, it inserts the pie chart in the 2 first slides before failing :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

If I run the solution provided in the training it works fine, and the only difference I see between the solution and my program, that I can see, is that the solution is in legacy mode.

image

I had the same issue running 2023.4.0 Community Edition.

Same error once it tried to insert the first pie chart. The pie chart would appear using the values from the pivot table relating to quarterly earnings. My guess would be that for some reason the activity is grabbing the data from the wrong pivot table despite me providing it with an alternate source.

The workaround I used in the end was to duplicate each sheet at the beginning so that I could have a dedicated sheet for each pivot table. Was awkward as I had to use a boolean variable to distinguish between inserting the bar chart and pie chart as it iterated through the sheets but it worked: