Turn Excel Data Into PowerPoint Slides Automatically

Did you know you can generate PowerPoint slides from Excel sheets automatically? For example, based on this Excel data, I've generated these three PowerPoint slides in just a few seconds using [music] Claude. And no, there's no copy-pasting data, no coding, and no complex AI agents. Let me show you exactly how it works. And thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring [music] this video. Here we are in Excel, and the first thing you're going to need to add is this Claude add-in. You will need a paid version of it. Just go over to add-ins if you don't have it installed. Under more add-ins, you want to look for Claude. So, this is very first one over here that you would need to add firstly here inside of Excel, and then over in PowerPoint, we want to do the same thing just by going to add-ins, more add-ins, and looking for Claude in PowerPoint, too. Once you install them, you should be able to just click inside and log in. Now, on the top right-hand side, this is a very important step, so make sure you pay attention. Just head over to settings, and within this area, you'll notice there's this let Claude work across files. You want to make sure that this is ticked so we can work across both PowerPoint and Excel so they communicate with each other. As a bit of a bonus point, up here is where you can actually customize a lot of what it generates. This is something very few people know about, but you can add things like your company's color palette, the font you want to use for the slides, and much more. Now that the setup is complete, let's open up an Excel file with some data to actually test this out. So, this is the file we're working with. You can see that the headers currently are a bit too short. We've also got some problems with the different cases in terms of formatting. You'll see that this figure, maybe we don't need the decimals with when it's such a big figure. This one, ideally, it should be in percentages. And so, we want to try to fix all of that formatting, too. And for that, we can head over to Claude. And the idea is that once we have this well formatted, we're going to convert it into a PowerPoint slide using this Claude add-in. So, first, I'm just going to put this prompt over here that I fast-forwarded, which just has to format this Excel sheet to look clean and professional. Some saying things like the percentage signs, the comma separators, and a few other points that I've just mentioned. Awesome. So, step one is done. We've got it nicely formatted thanks to Claude. And now, we want to convert this into a PowerPoint slide. >> [music] >> So, I'm simply asking it to create a PowerPoint slide based on this data. And one important thing to keep in mind here is that you need to have a PowerPoint file open already, so it's able to detect it. It's not going to open up a new one on its own. As you can see here under the instructions, it says it's sending it to the PowerPoint agent. So, if I actually head over to PowerPoint, you'll notice that it's actually speaking here to Claude as well on the side. And it's giving it the full instructions from Excel. And this particular Excel sheet, here's what I want you to do. Create a professional slide based on this data that I have. And if we keep scrolling down, it's going to start building it for us. Along the way, you'll notice that Claude does ask you for some permissions. So, basically, this is things like deleting some slides, making some major edits. >> [music] >> So, it's nice that it asked you this ahead of time. Obviously, if you already have this duplicated, so you have a backup saved, you can always just press dangerously always allow. Awesome. Now, it's finished. And as you can see, this is actually fully editable, much like any other PowerPoint presentation. That said, compared to the Excel file, you can see that it's gotten rid of these units. And over here to the right, it's actually fully in sync. So, it's explaining what's happened. And you can see it says you can now switch over to PowerPoint to review the slide. Overall, though, I'd like this to have a bit more information. So, let me actually add a follow-up prompt saying to make the slide more wordy and corporate-looking. Include a summary description, some footnotes, etc. Let's see if it's able to tweak this. Awesome. It seems like it's finished. This is what it's come up with. And this slide looks a lot more like what you might see if you work for a bank or a consulting firm in terms of how much more wordy it is, and a lot of the footnotes down below. You can see it's using best practices like adding these lines to separate each of the key areas. To learn more about how to use Claude AI for work, I'd recommend checking out HubSpot's complete guide to Claude AI. It's a resource that you can download completely for free by heading over to the link in the description below. It walks through practical ways to use Claude like an executive assistant for admin tasks, data analysis, strategic planning, and much more. It also includes some setup guidance and examples of how to use Claude for day-to-day tasks. I personally find the artifacts section very useful as it explains what they are and how they're different to just creating a temporary chat message. The guide provides some best practices for using artifacts, and even some prompt templates that you can simply copy-paste. So, if you want to get better at using Claude AI for work in a more structured and practical way, I'd recommend you head over to the link in the description below to download this completely free guide. And thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. The scenario we saw earlier used a two-step process. First, we did a prompt in Excel, and then we did another one in PowerPoint. This time around, though, let's see if we can just limit it all inside of PowerPoint, and it can even do the Excel analysis there. So, we'll have a look here with this data set that's a lot more extensive. This is a real-world data set on some of the richest people in the world. So, here in PowerPoint, I'm going to say to use the Excel file titled Claude PPT data, analyze it, and summarize the key insights in a professional-looking PowerPoint slide. So, here, I wanted to see if it can do the analysis directly inside PowerPoint, and also actually create the slide. For this, keep in mind you need to have the Excel file open, and also have Claude open within it. As you can see, it's now asked the Excel agent to read and share the data from the file. So, this is this Excel file, and you can see the Claude is now working within it, and it's reading all of the different sections. It should be able to fill that inside of PowerPoint. All right. So, it's finally finished, and you can see it's created this cover page up top, and then down below, it actually has the full breakdown. As you can see, we've got the total wealth, the percentage that are self-made, the average age, etc. And let's actually check if these figures are true. So, the average age says it's 68 years old. If I go over to the Excel file over here, I'm just going to do the average formula over to the side, and select all of the ages. Based on that, it does say 68. That's looking good. It also says there's four French billionaires, so let's test that. For that, I'm just going to do a count if, and the the range is all of this area right here. And the criteria is that in quotations, they need to be French. Now, let's close that, and see that the answer is exactly four. So, it looks like even though it's fully done inside of PowerPoint, the data analysis is working very well. That said, I'm not entirely happy with what the slide looks like. I want it to look a bit more corporate, so I'm just going to type in here to make it look more corporate, a bit more wordy, and look like more like a BCG or a McKinsey-style presentation, more like that consulting look. Let's see if it's able to make that change. Overall, as you've seen, we've been able to just work inside of PowerPoint. That said, because you still need to have the Excel file open all the time, I don't know that that makes a big difference. Awesome. Here's the final result. It's actually created three different slides, one being the header, and then these two slides which look a lot more like what you might see at a consulting firm. Overall, the numbers look quite good. I like this white background. We've got some footers on the bottom, which is pretty typical. That said, maybe a small change or a small mistake is the 16. Maybe I would have stretched it out more like this so it's a lot more visible than a one and a five or a one and a six. For this other slide, we've got this part right here, which is nice and clean. And all of this [music] is fully editable. If I actually click in this header, one thing that maybe it should have done as a very best practice is to add all of this as part of the slide master so we can't easily move around these lines. They should always stay in the same place. So, ideally, it would have gone over to view under slide master and made the changes there. You can see it's made some of them like adding this header on the top part. That's done it in the slide master. But maybe for this line, it should have also done that there. One important thing we haven't tested is how well it works with multiple Excel files. For example, over here, I have Nike's P&L for 2025. >> [music] >> Then in a separate sheet, I have a P&L for 2024. And in another one, I have it for 2023. So, based on those three files, I want to see if it's able to aggregate them and create a slide just for that. Over to the side, here's what I'm telling it that I have three Excel workbooks open, and it is important that you have all three of them actually open. And I want it to analyze each of the three workbooks, and find out the key figures to add them as a PowerPoint slide. You'll notice that it's now sent requests to all three of the different workbooks. If I go over to any one of them, you'll see that it's actually added the prompt of what to do. And from there, it's giving it all of the right data. Back here, you can see that it's found the data for 2023. It's just waiting for 2024. It has the 2025 one. And here, it seemed like it got stuck saying still waiting for 2024, but in fact, 2024 was already done, so I texted that in here. And you can see it's saying all three workbooks are now done, and hopefully, it's able to find the relevant data. Awesome. It's finished now. Maybe it took about 5 minutes to complete. And over here, you can see we have the summary. It's aggregated the data for all three years and the year-over-year change at the end. Also, you can see that it's using this orange color, which if I'm not mistaken, is the same orange as the one you see in Nike's logo. For the actual figures, 2023 ends in 217, which if I actually look over here, that's exactly the right number. Then down below, it's got the revenue and profitability trend, and you can see that it seems to be going down over time, and we've got some takeaways at the very end. While we've seen a lot of different scenarios, potentially the most realistic one is simply updating a deck that already exists. For example, here I have a made-up pitch deck that's for 2021, and based on this, I want to change just this particular chart. Let's say that our figures have now been updated to 2025, so we have an Excel file for that. More specifically, it's this file over here, and you can see the numbers are different, and also the countries are now different. We have Germany, which if we look back in here, Germany wasn't in there. Also, you'll notice that these are just flags. So, let's see if it's able to generate new flags, like for instance, for Germany. So, here I'm saying, "Update the chart with the top six countries by revenue based on this Excel file, and make sure you update the flags, too." Let's go ahead and run that. Interestingly here, it says that it can't download external images directly, but it can create Germany's flag using geometric shapes. So, let's see what it's able to come up with. It's now completed. In terms of the numbers, they have all been updated. If I look at the Excel file over here, they seem to be correct. It's also added the flag of Germany. That said, it's not worked on the order correctly. Over here, we have US, Mexico, and then Canada, whereas in the Excel file, you have US, Germany, and then Mexico, and there's actually no Canada in here. So, it seems to work quite well when it comes to the chart itself, but when it comes to rearranging shapes and icons, you can see here it didn't do such a great job. Like any tools, the Cloud Add-in also has its limitations. The first one, if you've been paying close attention, is that you need to have all of the Excel files or PowerPoint files open at the same time. So, that's a bit tedious to set up. Secondly, it doesn't have a live connection. So, even if I change the figures of this particular Excel file to say 20,000 in here, if I go over to the PowerPoint file, this figure is not going to update automatically. So, I would have to re-prompt that. That said, this is still a beta feature, so hopefully it continues to improve over time. If you want to learn the best AI tools specifically for finance, you should watch this video over here, or you can take our AI for business and finance course over here. Hit that like and that subscribe, and I'll catch you in the next one.