Export dashboard as a deck of PowerPoint slides with ReportPlus

Guillermo Lopez / Wednesday, May 15, 2013

So you’ve designed your first ReportPlus dashboard, congratulations!! Now you want to share it, right? Well, you have a number of options with ReportPlus:

  • Save the dashboard in a shared location, for other ReportPlus users to open it. This shared location can be a SharePoint document library, a Dropbox account, or a Google Drive folder.
  • Email the dashboard. For other ReportPlus users to open.
  • Email a screen capture. Send by email a picture of the dashboard, to share the dashboard with anyone, not just ReportPlus users.
  • Export the dashboard as a PowerPoint file. This is the option we are going to cover in some detail in this article.

ReportPlus Mobile Dashboard

Selecting what to export

By tapping the Export option in the actions popover a wizard that will guide us through the export process is displayed.

If the dashboard has page filters defined the first thing we will have to select is what to export, whether the current view of the dashboard, or a selection of pages, meaning an export of the dashboard filtered with the different values a page filter holds. For instance, exporting the HR Dashboard with all pages, will export the values for all the offices: New Jersey, London, etc. If the dashboard has multiple filters the first one will be selected to be used in the export process.

ReportPlus Dashboard Export PPT

If the all pages option is selected then, ReportPlus will automatically walk through the different values of the first pages filter. The export is capped in 50 pages so you must select less than 50 values to export.

Introducing annotations

In the second dialog of the export wizard a table listing the contents to be exported is displayed. 

ReportPlus Dashboard Annotations

At this point we have the option to introduce comments, and select which values are going to be exported by turning on or off the Visible switch.

ReportPlus Annotate Slide

Previewing the generated ppt

By tapping the preview button the generation process runs and the slides are displayed.

ReportPlus Dashboard Annotated

Sharing the slides

The final step in the export process is defining what to do with the generated file. The options are to send the slides to another iOS app, such as Keynote, or emailing the PowerPoint file.

ReportPlus_SendToApp

Wrap up

Well, we've gone through the export feature which enables ReportPlus dashboards to be shared with anyone. Some of ReportPlus users have requested the ability to customize the PowerPoint template used in the export process, and I wanted to point out that this option is available in the Enterprise version as part of the rebranding support. If you want to know more about the Enterprise version, just let us know!