How Set Up Pictures in PowerPoint for Real-time Picture Content

Jan 22, 2015 | DataPoint, DataPoint Real-time Screens

dynamic database driven pictures in a powerpoint slide show
Pictures say so much more than words. That is why advertising cannot live without pictures, photographs, and video. An ad with only text is boring and unexceptional. People love to see graphics to visualize messages.

With DataPoint the user can create dynamic presentations where the user can have a list of products or ads in a database, Excel file, or text file. In other articles on this blog, we have already explained how the user can connect a text box or table to a database list of data. We will show how the user can enrich the data driven slides with images to accompany the texts.

Imagine for this dynamic presentation that we are working at a hospital and that we want to display the names and pictures of the doctors that are available today.

excel file with names of images

Data connections

First set up a connection to the Excel file. Click DataPoint in the PowerPoint menu.

click datapoint in powerpoint menu
Now click the List button of the Connections group.
list of data connections in powerpoint
Navigate to the Excel files node and select it.
select the excel node to add an excel connection
Now click Add connection and browse to Excel file. Click OK to commit the file selection.
select the excel file that you want to link
Now click the Add query button and select the data sheet with the data and set the range to a safe maximum range and check the option that the first row contains the field or column names.
set up the data sheet connection and refresh rate
Hit OK to close and again OK to commit the connections list.

Link data to shapes

We can start to link information to our slide. Design the slide and add 3 text boxes to hold the doctor’s names. For each one of the text boxes select one and click DataPoint, Text box and set the column to Name and set the corresponding row to 1, 2 and 3 respectively. This will dynamically link the content of our Excel data to our PowerPoint text boxes.

To the left of the names we want to display the doctor’s picture. To start we insert a normal picture on our slide as we are used to do in PowerPoint. Click Insert, Pictures and browse to the folder containing the picture that the user wants to use for this presentation. As a default picture, we just use a question mark picture for now before we make it dynamic.

linked text boxes are now ready and data driven to our excel file
Now we are going to display dynamic pictures based on the data that we have in our Excel file, and that will be updated every day.

Select the first picture and click DataPoint, Picture. Now PowerPoint will suggest to change this static picture into a dynamic DataPoint picture for dynamic updating. Choose the Yes option here.

convert a static picture into a dynamic picture
Then set the column to our Picture column of Excel, and for the first picture, we leave the row number at one. Note that the Excel column is holding the name of the picture without the folder name and the extension of the file. We can manipulate this in the picture properties here. At the Options frame indicate that the picture column is holding the filename only. Then set the folder to our folder that contains all the doctor’s pictures and set (in our case) the extension to png.

 

dynamic picture properties and linking options in powerpoint
We see a preview of the picture here when everything is correctly set. Hit OK to apply.

Set up dynamic slide show

Now we have dynamically linked the picture to our Excel data. We repeat this action for the doctors on data row 2 and 3 too. All the information remains the same as the first picture except here we increase the row.

preview of dynamic pictures on a powerpoint slide
As a final action, we want to make sure that the slide show will run continuously. Click Set Up Slide Show in the Slide Show menu and set the Show Type to Browsed at a kiosk and hit OK to apply.
prepare slide show settings for dynamic slide show
Now the user can run the slide show on the television screen in the waiting area of the hospital. Names and pictures are now changed in the Excel file that resides on a file server. DataPoint will now check the content of the Excel file for new data and change the texts and pictures in the slide show accordingly without interrupting the running slide show.
powerpoint slide show running with dynamic text and pictures from excel file

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9 Comments

  1. Lebohang
    Lebohang on November 24, 2015 at 08:06

    Please update me i’m still an intern our impress my manager with your dynamic art.

  2. admin
    admin on November 30, 2015 at 15:11

    How can I help you?

  3. Christina
    Christina on December 21, 2015 at 00:07

    How can I select a specific size Image box and when I Snapshot the presentation all the images be scaled and centered in the box?

  4. Martin Nadeau
    Martin Nadeau on October 17, 2016 at 19:08

    I’m Using PowerPoint 2014 and the picture that I want to make dynamic is locate din the “Slide Master”, so the end users do not have easy access to click on it unless they switch to the Slide Master view.

    When I switch to the master view and insert the picture I want, then I setup the datapoint binding through the Picture connection properties. Then when I click “OK” to save the binding. I get the following message:

    Public member ‘slideindex’ on type ‘Master’ not found.

    I’m using the DataPoint Standard version.

  5. Admin
    Admin on October 17, 2016 at 19:22

    Dear Martin, that might be correct. DataPoint does not support slide master linking yet. Only linking directly on the slides is possible. We are working on slide master linking and hope to release this before the end of this year!

  6. varsha
    varsha on July 8, 2019 at 19:15

    What version of Powerpoint has Datapoint tad?

  7. varsha
    varsha on July 8, 2019 at 19:29

    I understand the process of creating a PPT from some database server. Is there a way the PPT generated can be edited?

  9. Admin
    Admin on July 8, 2019 at 19:46

    Sure. The generated PowerPoint files can be edited by the normal PowerPoint application.

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