Try out PowerPoint#

"We rebuild the board deck by hand every month" is the problem this solves, and Timberline is the working proof. The deck contains no data, it is a template whose shapes are bound to Excel and refilled on every run.

Run it first#

1. Open Workspace ▸ Timberline ▸ Financial Reports ▸ Board Packet.
2. Run it. It produces one deck per region, four decks, from one template and one workbook.
3. Open a deck. Every figure, table and chart came from Timberline_Board_Pack.xlsx; the title, the running footer and the headline strings came from cells in it too.

Board Packet with Division Slides exists precisely to show this: its second source workbook contributes one Revenue Review tab that repeats per market. Run it and compare: same template, but instead of four decks you get one high-level deck whose sales revenue slide repeats once per division. That difference is replication, not PowerPoint, see How parameters work.

Then open the template and see how#

Timberline_Board_Pack.pptx is 8 slides, 16:9, every slide on a blank layout with explicit shapes. Three binding mechanisms are at work, and the deck uses all three.

1. Cell tokens in text#

A text box whose content is {SlideTitle} or {A45} is replaced at run time with that named range or cell's value.

This is why the deck says "FY2026 Board Review, $ in millions" without anyone editing PowerPoint. The strings live in the workbook.

2. Linked shapes#

Picture shapes carry a link naming the report, the worksheet, and the object to render into them. Three kinds are in use:

The deck links 21 named objects across five worksheets: the six KPI tiles on the at-a-glance slide, the summary P&L, the earnings-bridge income statement, three Outlook tables, the plan assumptions, four charts, and two market-review tables from a second workbook.

Prefer named ranges to raw addresses. A named range survives someone inserting a row in the source workbook; I14:N25 does not. Timberline's main deck binds mostly by named range, which is the pattern to copy.

3. Bookmarked slide sections#

Each worksheet in the job carries a parent bookmark name that selects which slide section it feeds:

Because Revenue Review replicates one page per item, its bookmarked section repeats, one market slide per market value, inside one deck. That combination is how a fixed template produces a variable-length deck.

What the job controls#

The board jobs all set the same PowerPoint options: 200 PPI, fit to width, and OFFICECOMPATIBLEEMF image format. EMF stays crisp when a viewer scales a slide, at the cost of a larger file, a reasonable default for a board deck.

A job needs a template to emit a deck. Headless PowerPoint generation has nothing to build into otherwise. Note that Divisional Packet carries a template but currently outputs Excel and PDF only, so it will not produce a deck as configured.

Gotchas worth mentioning in a demo#

• Copying a linked shape breaks the link. The binding travels with the shape's tag; paste it into another slide or deck and it stops updating.
• One replicating worksheet per slide section. Mapping several replicating sheets into one bookmarked section produces unpredictable ordering.
• Raw-address links break when rows move. Use named ranges.
• Recipients can refresh decks themselves. The business accounts hold the PowerPoint End User entitlement, so refreshing a deck is not an author-only action.

Related#

• The report catalog · How parameters work
• Customer guide: PowerPoint reporting