How to Design an interactive PPT -Dynamic Filtering Slides via VBA (Free)

Designing great slides is an essential skill when you would like to give an important presentation to your target audience. To achieve it, you need to summarize your content into concise sentences or even only a couple of key points. You need to organize the sequence and the rhythm of content to guide your audiences understand your points quickly without misunderstandings. You also need to do some research on the coloring, the font type and size to make sure people can read it through comfortably. Sometimes you might need to provide some dynamic features to have your presentation more interactive, easy-to-read, and dashboard-like.

You will think of Power BI, Tableau or other interactive visualization tools when it comes to business intelligence dashboards. However, you might not go these routes because

1. You don’t have any licenses for these softwares.
2. You would not like to switch between these softwares and PPT slides back and forth.
3. The data you have is not structured so it is hard to populate it into these softwares.

We are going to introduce an approach to help you design interactive slides in MS PowerPoints via VBA. In this session, we will mainly focus on designing a dynamic filtering slide to present a price range chart by Laptop brands and by GPUs.

Demo

Since there are lots of data points in the canvas, we want to create toggle buttons with embedded VBA functions to let the user/ presenter control the visibility of the different brands so that we can easily do the comparison between only two brands.

Step 1: Build individual bar charts by brand and make them transparent.

Brand 1

Brand 2

Brand 3

Step 2: Make sure you know the object name for each of the charts. Click on the chart and go to tab “Design” -> “Format” -> “Selection Pane”. You can double click on any name and rename it (Brand1/Brand2/Brand3).

Step 3: Combine three bar charts by overlapping them with each other. Make sure you have all axes aligned with each other by putting them in the same position.

Combining Chart

Step 4: Creating toggle buttons to control the visibility of charts. Clicking on the button will make each chart invisible (visible) if it is visible (invisible). Full VBA codes behind the buttons (See here).

Thank you! Enjoy it :)