Add data from Alteryx to slide in existing PowerPoint deck

[EnglishManBob]

Is there a way to push data from an Aleryx workflow into an existing slide?

Currently I can do this using an internecine Excel file, but cannot do this with the output of a workflow.

I'm only interested in a basic table:

Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
0.15	0.17	0.19	0.22

[kelly_gilbert · Accepted solution]

@EnglishManBob - yes, there are a couple of ways to do it, depending on what else is on the slide/in the deck.

Method 1 (easiest): you can recreate the whole slide using Alteryx reporting tools and then render it to a .pptx file (example here)

Method 2 (more complex): create a template file in PowerPoint, with placeholders for the various numbers (for example, your PowerPoint slide would have the table on it, and then you would have placeholders, like |1|, |2|, |3|, etc. in each cell. A PowerPoint file is just a zip file containing a bunch of .xml files, so you can:

1. un-zip the template pptx
2. Use Alteryx to read in the xml for the slides you want to update
3. Replace the placeholders with data (e.g. replace "|1|" with the value of metric1)
4. Output the modified xml file
5. re-zip the template

(examples here and here)

[jraphael]

Hi Kelly, how do you output the modified xml since Alteryx output does not support xml file format?

[kelly_gilbert]

Treat the file as a CSV (even though it has a .xml extension) in both the input and output tools. You can check out the example workflows linked in the posts above for more detail, but here's a quick screenshot of how the output tool could be configured:

[jraphael]

Thank you Kelly, I was able to update the content of one slide. However, when I try to re-zip the entire ppt report with all the slides it doesn't open anymore. I have the following messages, I click on repair:

and then I get an error message

 

 

I use 7 zip to zip it and just change the extension to pptx as explained in various posts on the community but can't make it work. Is there something I'm missing?

Thank you