Working on websites, we work in rows and rows of data. A lot. But what happens when an executive wants to know more about that project you are notating from a data export? You have to turn your mind-numbing spreadsheet with filters and color coding only you might understand into a more digestible format. Now comes the hours and hours spent copying over information into a presentation.
Not anymore!
With Google Apps Script, you can inject data from Google Sheets into a template in Google Slides and generate hundreds of pretty slides in just minutes.
Let’s say your executive wants to be able to see how well inbound marketing is working, but doesn’t want to look at a giant table of URLs stacked on top of each other. We will use an export of the Behavior > Landing Pages report from Google Analytics and generate a slide for each page in the report with the metrics bulleted out.
Getting Started In Your Container’s Script Editor
The first thing to understand about the Google Apps Script is that the script needs to be built into a “container,” which is a file of the G Suite Service that will contain the script to be run. The container usually has some initial setup for the script too.
For our case, our container will be a Google Slides file. It will have a title slide and then a slide that will serve as a template.
Make a copy of this container presentation
Once you’ve got your container set up, just open Tools > Script Editor to start writing your function.
While you could just dive right in and run the script (just push play) within this container, let’s go over how it works, so you can start customizing it for your own needs.
Using the Script Editor
The first time you run your script, you will be required to allow Google the ability to view, edit, etc your apps.
If you are running a script from a copy of someone’s container (like this example), you might see a screen before the above approval telling you Google hasn’t verified the source (but we are right now so you know there isn’t any malicious script!). As long as you trust the code, you will need to open the Advanced options and go ahead to the function.
Once approved, the script should continue running.
When a script is running, you’ll see an alert at the top of the editor. Once it is stopped (and provided that no error message has appeared), your script should have completed!
As you update, make sure you are saving! When you have unsaved changes, a little red asterisk will appear.
To see the outputs of your variables, use “Logger.log().” Access the logs from within the View menu.
Understanding the Google Apps Script Classes
For those of you savvy in JavaScript, you may think you are ready to get coding. However, there are a couple of differences. For starters, using Logger.log instead of console.log. The biggest difference, though, is that you won’t be traversing a DOM. Instead, you’ll have to understand the different classes for the various apps.
**THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF USING GOOGLE APPS SCRIPT!**
Each app has a hierarchy of classes. Once you understand the hierarchy, you can then move about the app and reference the appropriate class documentation (which will be linked each time a new class is referenced here), to determine what properties and methods are available for the class.
Sheets Classes
For Google Sheets, everything begins with the parent class SpreadsheetApp. While there are many classes within, we will be using the Spreadsheet, Sheet, and Range classes. These classes have a nicely defined hierarchy, as pictured below.
Slides Classes
The Slides service is SlidesApp, which works with the Presentation class. We will also be using the Slide, Shape, PageElement, and TextRange classes. When reviewing the documentation you’ll see that sometimes these classes can be children or siblings, which makes for a messier hierarchy. The “Return Type” in the methods documentation is key to ensure your output is the type you need and expect.
Accessing Your Apps in The Script
Both the parent classes we are working with can use the following methods for opening them.
- openByUrl()
- openById()
- getActive…()
If your script is contained within a Spreadsheet, you can use getActiveSpreadsheet(). Since we are working out of a Slides container, we will use getActivePresentation().
It will likely be easier for all team members to use the full URL of their Sheets, so we will use that method for Sheets. To more easily switch out spreadsheet URLs, we will put the URL into its own variable. The variable name will then be used within the functions.
Let’s declare the files we are working with:
You’ll replace “full url here!” with the actual URL of the spreadsheet, including the /edit at the end. Be sure to keep the quotes to ensure your dataSpreadsheetUrl variable is a string. Here’s how it appears in the completed script:
The actual Spreadsheet we will be working with is this Sheet generated from a Landing Pages report from Google Analytics (GA), but with dummy data. The typical daily index at the bottom is removed. It is important to retain the structure of the export as the script will be looking for the data range based on the format and mapping them based on the columns. That spreadsheet’s URL has been placed into the dataSpreadsheetUrl variable within the script.
Getting Your Data From Google Sheets
Now that we have declared a Spreadsheet, we need to get the correct Sheet (aka tab) within it and set the range of data we will pass to Slides.
The variable “ss” is now a Spreadsheet type. A method of Spreadsheet is getSheetByName().
The default tab name from generating this report from Google Analytics is “content-landing-pages.” Thus we will declare the sheet with getSheetByName(‘content-landing-pages’).
Now we need to declare the range of data within our Sheet. The getRange() method on the Sheet class has several variations that pass different parameters. For the sake of this project, we should always know the exact range, so we can use the A1 Notation version. However, if you need to automate from reports where the range is unknown, the trick is to set a variable for sheet.getLastRow() and sheet.getLastColumn() to put those variables in as the numRows and numColumns parameters, respectively.
When reviewing our data of just the top 10 Landing Pages, our A1 Notation range, which does NOT include headings, is A8:J17. If you export more results than that, be sure to change the row from 17.
Once you have a Range, you can then use the getValues() method, which generates a two-dimensional array ([][]) with the first index being by row and then by column. I’ll refer to these later as the “rows” array and the “columns” array. Note that hidden rows and columns in the spreadsheet will still be grabbed.
We will get the range and values in one declaration:
Using “Logger.log(values)” immediately after that declaration, I was able to see what our data looks like in this two-dimensional array.
Now that we have data, let’s place it into our presentation!
Find the Appropriate Slides Inside the Presentation
As mentioned previously, containers for Apps Script usually have some sort of initial setup. For Slides, you definitely need to set up a template slide or slides. The one we are working from is set up to have a title slide and then a two-column layout slide with placeholder tags that will indicate where to inject the data. We will be duplicating our template slide for each row of data we have.
Our template slide, pictured below, has {{landing page}} in the title with some of our analytics data bulleted out, using curly braces to identify placeholder tags. I’m using curly braces to set these off from other formatting and text that will not be replaced.
First, we need to access our template slide. The Presentation we’ve declared in our “deck” variable can now use the getSlides() method to get an array of all of the slides.
Now we have an array with a Slide at each index. Because we have a title slide before our template slide, we will be using slides[1] to access the template slide, as this is a 0-based index.
Since we will be adding slides to the presentation to create a new slide for each row of data, we need to continuously update our array of slides (as we did when declaring the slides variable) and its length, which we do by:
Now we need to loop through the “rows” in our two-dimensional array in order to replace the individual text for each Landing Page. Because our values are representative of a webpage, I will set “page” as the element we process in the callback function.
Just for a nice check that we didn’t get an empty row in our data range, I include a conditional to ensure that the Landing Page field, which is now the first in our index of columns, exists.
Within our loop we need to do the following actions:
- Map all of our “columns” data to variables
- Duplicate our template slide and declare the new slide
- Replace our placeholder text on our new slide. This will have to be done inside another loop of all of the shapes within the slide
- Move our new slide to the end of the presentation to retain the order
Map All of Our “Columns” Data to Variables
Right now we are in a loop of each row of data from our two-dimensional array. Each row is an array of data from the columns in our range. We need to review our columns headings and map them to variables in our Apps Script.
We are only going to use the data from Landing Page, Sessions, % New Sessions, Pages/Session, Goal 1 Conversion Rate, and Goal 1 Value.
As mentioned with the conditional statement, page[0] is Landing Page, so page[1] is Sessions and so on.
Those already quite familiar with coding know that numbers can be quite fun irritating. While we want to represent the newSessions and goalRate as percentages, our script has pulled it from the sheet as a plain ‘ol number that is also not neatly rounded. So, we need to do some math to get the output we’d like.
Duplicate The Template Slide and Declare the New Slide
With our templateSlide variable, we can run the duplicate() method, which will place the duplicate after the templateSlide. We need to then update our slides array to find the duplicate slide and declare it. Since we started with only two pages, the new slide will be the third in the presentation, or second in our index. We do all this because want to retain our template for the next slide in our array.
Replace Our Placeholder Text
As mentioned, this step requires another loop. We have to use the getShapes() method on the Slide, which will return an array of all shapes on the Slide. Within the array, each Shape can use the getText() method to return the TextRange, which will then allow us to replaceAllText() for each of our placeholder tags.
We’ve gone ahead and closed out that forEach loop on the shapes, but we are still in our “rows” loop from the two-dimensional array, or values variable. Before we close that we want to update the order of slides.
Move the Slide
Update the slides array and length so our current page in the values array will always be the last slide. Use the move() method to move to the Slide to the end of the presentation.
Don’t forget to remove your template slide.
Now save and run your script. Once the alert at the top of the editor is gone (and error free), head back to your container presentation to bask in all your automated glory.
While this is just one example, knowing how to inject data from several rows of Sheets into Slides has so many uses in digital marketing. Think of the many reports that need deeper analysis page by page: content audits, technical requirements, mapping event tracking, etc. Hopefully this gets you exploring the possibilities within Google Apps Script!
This is glorious.
Thank you; don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions!
I don’t understand how I tie my variable fields to the API script? I just have two…one called “FullName” and one called “College”
Hi Kelly,
Thanks for reaching out. I’m sorry I don’t quite understand your question. It sounds like you may be wondering where to declare the values within your Sheets into the script? Make sure you updated the correct range of data in the variable declaration for “values”
var values = sheet.getRange('{{your data range from your Sheet here}}').getValues. Then from within the loop of “values”values.forEach(function(page){that is where you would set your variables, which is explained in the Map All of Our “Columns” Data to Variables section of the post. Let me know if you need any additional help.All the best!
-Danielle
Hi!
Thanks for the tutorial, it’s working nicely!
How would you amend the script so that the script auto-refreshes the slide where the information is pulled to? What I mean is if I modify the data in the Google Sheet, can the slide show the amended numbers automatically without having me to re-run the script manually?
Glad to hear it is working well for you!
Because the data overwrites the generic placeholders in the presentation, you’d have to start fresh with a whole new presentation. In that case, you may want to contain the script in the spreadsheet instead of a presentation. This script updates how the “deck” and “ss” variables in my original script get set when contained in a spreadsheet and needing to access a newly created presentation (with a unique name which is set by the current date & time) to access: https://codepen.io/dani_r/pen/zYGvvpp.js. While there are triggers for onChange in Spreadsheets, any time a cell changes it would generate a whole new presentation with the latest date & time stamp in the name, so I don’t really recommend that. Possibly just moving the script into the Spreadsheet will make it more convenient to run it as you finalize edits to the data.
-Danielle
Nice tutorial, could you share the google slide also? Thanks!
Thanks! You can make a copy of the Google Slide from this link here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WWvln_EEn9kJaSbbyasBDa-V-HXzy4SYwDdKxCagtRs/copy
Thank you so much for the tutorial; its been really easy to follow and exactly what I was after.
My slide presentation has 2x slide templates, how do I adapt the script to suit?
Hi Vicky,
I appreciate your feedback and am so glad to hear this is working well for you!
For different slide layouts, start your template with the various layouts as individual slides and the placeholder copy you’d want in them. Then when you initially get your array of slides (var slides = deck.getSlides()), it will have multiples for you to assign, like var titlePage = slides[0], var sectionTitles = slides[1], var twoColLayout = slides[2], and so on.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
-Danielle
This is one of the best tutorials I’ve seen. Is it possible to create graphs in the Slide from the data in the Sheet?
Thanks for your feedback! It looks like you would probably have to create the chart in Sheets and use the SheetsChart class to embed it into your Slides: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/slides/sheets-chart.
Happy scripting!
-Danielle
This is wonderful! Thank you so much! We also have a question asking for an uploaded image. Is there a way to have the image that is uploaded insert into the slide as well?
Hi Katelyn, I appreciate you reaching out! If you have an image that you’d want as part of every slide, like a logo, I’d include that with your placeholders on the “template slide” or slides (see another comment about having multiple layouts). Otherwise if you need to include it via the Apps Script on certain slides, you can use the Image Class for Slides App: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/slides/image.
All the best!
-Danielle
Thank you so much for the tutorial – It is very easy to follow! If a row is blank (i.e. page[0] and page[6]) within the data range, I would like to prompt the script to use a second template (which will just be a blank page serving as a section separator). Any advice on how to go about that?
Hi Chanel,
Thanks for your feedback! I want to make sure I answer both parts of your question.
To set up another template slide:
Start your template with the various layouts as individual slides and the placeholder copy you’d want in them. Then when you initially get your array of slides (var slides = deck.getSlides()), it will have multiples for you to assign, like var titlePage = slides[0], var sectionTitles = slides[1], var twoColLayout = slides[2], and so on.
To use the other template while looping through your pages:
You’ll probably want to use an if statement. In my script, I use one to check to make sure there is data in the row with simply
if(page[0]) {//create the slide}so you could add then add anelse {//do the other thing}after that, which should catch all rows without data. The else statement is where you would generate your section slide that you defined from deck.getSlides().All the best!
-Danielle
This is an amazing tutorial and I am new to programming! My slides are populating perfectly, except for my images. The image is stored in the sheets as a url. I have tried several different ways to get them to populate. heres a few i’ve tried and have failed.
//var Img = UrlFetchApp.fetch(Images).getBlob().getAs(‘image/png’);
//var Cht = UrlFetchApp.fetch(Chart).getBlob().getAs(‘image/png’);
//var Chartpng = (newSlide.getImages());
// Chartpng.forEach(function(image){
// image.getContentUrl(Chart).getAs(‘image/png’);
// });
// var Imagepng = (newSlide.getImages());
// Imagepng.forEach(function(image){
// image.getContentUrl(Images).getBlob().getAs(‘image/png’);
//image.getTitle().replace(‘imagepc’,Imagepng);
// });
Could you set me in the right direction. what am I missing?
Hi April,
I’m so glad to hear you found this guide helpful in getting you started!
What I’m not seeing from your example code is where you are pulling in the images from the sheet. These don’t appear to be elements that can be pulled from ranges. Instead, within the Sheets class there are methods for getImages() or getCharts() to use depending on what type of image it is in in the sheet. Once you get the appropriate type, then you’d probably use the .getAs() method as you were to set it for the type of use you need in the Slides.
All the best!
-Danielle
Super.. Works like a charm!!
Thanks for sharing your feedback; it’s great to hear!
Thank you for this amazing tutorial.
If we need to put the values in a table , (for example we want to create a table for for just avg. session duration and goal conversion rates (2×1 table)) the code seems that it dont’t recognize the texts in the tables in the template slide. What can you suggest for replacing the tags in the table?
Could you please upload an example for creating charts in Slides with data from Sheets?
Best,
Hi Omer,
Thanks for reaching out! If your table is being generated from the information for one “page” (which it sounds like), then you could try to set your template slide up with a table and use the placeholder text within the appropriate cells. If it can’t find the placeholder text, you may need to look for the Table class and the appropriate cells to then replace the information within the TableCell to then use the getText() method from the cell.
If you are trying to generate a table from multiple rows from your Sheets range, then you could use the Table class to append rows and columns as you are looping through your values
values.forEach(function(page){}.All the best!
-Danielle
Thank you so much for this tutorial!
How would I be able to do this, but create a new presentation for each row based on the template? Ideally into a specific Drive folder too?
I think .makeCopy(slidename) might work, but I am not sure how exactly to add this into my code when looping through the rows. “slidename” would be unique for each row.
Also, if I want to insert an image in place of a placeholder tag, what should the code be and how could I insert it into the loop?
Thanks again!
Hi Jay,
If you want to create new presentations for every row of data in a spreadsheet, then you probably want to have the Apps Script contained in the spreadsheet itself. Another reply asked about something similar, so I built this codepen that shows how you can create a templateDeck variable from inside a Sheet’s script editor. That solution creates new Slides with the date and time appended, which you probably don’t need. You’d just replace the newDeckName variable with whatever you want or just pass that name in the
makeCopy("Slide-Name-Here").As for an image, the answer depends on if you are pulling your image in from the data in the sheet or not and if it is a chart or an actual image. Within the Sheet class there are methods for getImages() or getCharts() to use depending on what type of image it is in in the sheet. However, in order to place it in your Slide, you’d need to reference the Image Class for Slides.
Thanks for reaching out!
-Danielle
I don’t normally take the time to comment on tutorials, however I feel the need to voice my opinion on this one:
This is one of the most thorough and well-made tutorials I have ever come across online. I often find myself having to make tutorial-like documents for internal use to instruct employees on how to do something technical, so I understand the time and effort that went into making this. Seriously, great job and thank you for making it.
I really appreciate your feedback! Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
This is great.
Is there a way i can add a column with image url’s and load them the same way? been searching for a while now and i can’t seem to find a solution.
Thanks again.
Thanks for reading and responding! It sounds like if you have the image URL in your data then you can use insertImage(imageUrl) from the Slide or Page Class. Since this a method on the Slide class, you’d do that within the loop of our data on the newSlide being created
values.forEach(function(page){//declare your imageUrl as page[{{index of image url column}}] and then insert image in here using newSlide.insertImage(imageUrl)}All the best!
-Danielle
Hi Danielle,
I found this article incredibly helpful. Thank you for taking the time to put this together! I am trying to use the insertImage(imageUrl) method from the Slide class, but for some reason it keeps saying “slides.insertImage is not a function”. I believe that I have the same goal as HJ. I would like to insert an image into Slides from a url in the google sheet.
I would appreciate any additional guidance you can provide.
Hello Justin,
Thank you for your feedback!
The slides variable, when it is declared using .getSlides(), is an array, so the insertImage method won’t work on that class. You’ll need to be on a Slide or Page class type in order to use the insertImage(imageUrl) method. You can do that inside the loop of the slides, like
slides.forEach(function(slide){slide.insertImage(imageUrl)}. Or you could do it if you have identified just one slide of the array, likeslides[2].insertImage(imageUrl).All the best!
-Danielle
This is incredibly helpful. I put the image call just above the var shapes group. I found it initially put every single image on every single slide (including the cover). I changed the call slightly to be:
slides.forEach(function(slide){newSlide.insertImage(ImageUrl)}
This sort of works – it puts the correct image on each slide, but it puts it there 3 times. Why 3? How do I get it to maybe just do that once?
Hi Gretchen,
I’m glad to hear you were able to get the images inserted.
If I am understanding correctly, you are inside of the
values.forEach(function(page){loop. Within that you should have all of your columns mapped to variables, including one for var ImageUrl. This should represent the current row of data to be inputted into a slide. For this row, we are creating a newSlide variable to pass all of this row’s data only into. So you don’t need to use a loop for slides here. You can just use that newSlide variable and do newSlide.insertImage(ImageUrl).All the best!
-Danielle
Thanks Danielle! That did the trick. You’re fantastic and thank you so much for this.
Great to hear!
Do you have to handle urls stored in the spreadsheet, that are to images on google drive differently? I’ve read where I would have to save them to a website, but that’s not an option as this is part of a project for my work. I keep getting the following error: Exception: The image at URL https://drive.google.com/open?id=12Zdpih0j0ulr6ZZMT41nu7Z (deleted part of it) could not be retrieved. Please make sure the image is valid and publicly accessible. (line 34, file “Code”)
Hi Maggie,
I’m not aware of any difference in using Google Drive URLs other than making sure the sharing settings for the Drive file/image make it available to be accessed by anyone.
All the best!
-Danielle
This has been very helpful, many thanks. I have got my basic script working, which, as a non-programmer, I’m dead chuffed about! Very well written and easy to understand.
Thanks for your feedback, Thom! I’m so glad you found the tutorial easy to follow. Maybe this will spark a new interest in programming for you; I know how that excitement over seeing your code running and working can lead to trying more. Let me know if you have any questions as you add to/customize this.
What a brilliant and easy to follow tutorial. It’s made my life a ton easier! Thank you!
I do have one question I can’t seem to figure out an answer to. This is great for pulling data content into the slide deck but how would I pull a cell’s data AND the same cells background/fill colour into the slide too?
Hi Craig,
I’m so glad to hear that this has helped make life easier!
For the background color, you will have to change the way you are pulling information from the Sheet. The getRange() method used is looking at several cells at once to bulk “export” the values within. The getBackground() method for a Range only pulls the top-left most cell’s color, so you will need to find a way to get down to each individual cell within your range to check it with getBackground(). Then once you have that information you will have to pass it over into your Slide and set it using the TextStyle Class on the appropriate variable. That variable will have to be a TextRange Class, which aside from replacing specific text I’ve found difficult to use. If you can figure out how to define the appropriate copy within your TextRange, you could apply a conditional within your script, like
if(goalRate < 1) {//do the text styling here}.Best of luck!
-Danielle