SlideMight: Automatically Generate PowerPoint Presentations

Problem

• It is quite common for Excel users to automatically generate Excel spreadsheets by creating CSV files.
• PowerPoint does not offer a comparable text file format that can be automatically generated and imported to create PowerPoint presentations.
• For example, I was looking for a way to automatically generate a PowerPoint presentation for a training class for an amateur radio license exam. The FCC license exam consists of 35 multiple choice questions from a pool of several hundred questions. The entire question pool, including each question, the four possible choices, and the correct answer, is available online. What I needed was an easy way to automatically generate a presentation consisting of one slide per question, with an animation that could be used to reveal the correct answer after presenting the question.

Solution

• SlideMight is a powerful and inexpensive tool that can automatically generate PowerPoint presentations from a specially formatted plain text file and a PowerPoint template.
• Just as some skill and care is required to generate a CSV file for import into Excel, some skill and care is required to generate the plain text file used by SlideMight. However, this is not beyond the capabilities of many PowerPoint users.
• All of the relevant files are available here.