How to Insert Slides from Another Deck

Pull specific slides from a master slide library into a new presentation

It can be very useful to maintain a centralized slide library for sales, marketing, and product materials. Instead of manually copying slides and reformatting them, with Slideform you can pull in images of the slides into any new presentation.

Follow the steps below to re-use slides from another deck in your presentations.

Link your master slide library as a data source

Save your master slide library in Google Slides format (PowerPoint is not supported) and share the deck with share@slideform.co.
In Slideform go to the Data Sources page and click Add Data Source.
Choose the Google Slides option and paste in the link to your slide library. Click Save and the slides will be available as a data source in Slideform.

Add placeholders to your slide deck template

Create a template for your presentations following the normal process (see How to create a slide deck template for help).
Create a placeholder for an entire slide from a different deck by adding a large rectangle shape to the slide. Add placeholder text inside the shape as follows:
```
{{chart:placeholder_name}} 
```
This means that the rectangle will be filled with an image of the other slide. Set the rectangle's fill and border to transparent.
Here is an example template with three placeholders for entire slides.
Upload your slide template to Slideform as a New Project.

Optional - Set slide visibility conditions

You can specify whether any particular slide will be included in the final output with a visibility condition. For example, in the template show above, I may not want to include the team slide (slide 4) in all the outputs. I entered the following visibility condition in the speaker notes:
```
visible: {{show_team_slide}}  == ‘yes’ 
```
In my example, the team slide will always be copied over from my master slide library, but it will only be shown in the output when the variable "show_team_slide" is set to "yes".
For more information on visibility conditions, see How to set slide visibility

Configure the data mapping

Open the project using the Configure Data button. Once there you will be able to set up the data mapping for each of the placeholders in your template. Find more details here: How to configure the data mapping

Placeholders for entire slides are treated the same as any other placeholder, you can either set it to a specific slide, or you can determine the slide dynamically based on another variable.

First, make sure the master slide deck is available as a data source for this project. Go to the Data Sources tab at the top of the Configure Data page and enable the correct data source. Don't forget to save the project.
Static mapping - Set a placeholder to always be filled by a particular slide from your library.
To set a data mapping, go to the placeholder and click "Preset a Value". Then select your data source (the master slide deck) and the chart (slide number in this case). Leave the "worksheet" blank. You can preview the chart to make sure it is correct.

Make sure to save the project when you are done with the data mapping.
Optional - Dynamic mapping - Use a variable to determine which slide from your library will be pulled in. This is useful when you have multiple versions of some content, such as a case study or product description.
In this example, I have two different versions of the the "solution" slide, depending on which package the client is buying. I will show the correct slide based on an internal variable called "solution number".
1. First, create a placeholder in the template to hold the internal variable "solution number". I put mine in the speaker notes. Refresh your template to get this variable into Slideform.
2. On the configure data page, set the internal variable to be filled with the correct data. Note: The allowed values for this variable are the slide IDs in the library, such as slide_2, slide_3, etc. The only hiccup is that the numbering starts with zero, so slide 4 in the deck has an ID of slide_3. This may seem complicated but it is really simple to use a Google Sheet for the matching.
3. Set the data mapping for the slide placeholder by clicking "Preset a value". Choose the data source and select the internal variable to identify the chart, as shown.
  Now the value of "solution_number" will be used to determine which slide to import here.

Generate the presentation output

Click Generate on the project card, or use Bulk Mode to create multiple presentations at once. The output will be listed under All Downloads.

Updating the master slide deck

You can access the slide library through the Data Sources page. Just click on the name of the data source to go to the google slides. If you make changes to the deck, just click Refresh below the data source to pull in the latest version. Alternatively, you can set the project settings to always refresh the data source before generating a presentation.

Note - When you make changes to the master slide deck, pay attention to the slide numbers. If your project points to slide #3, just make sure that slide #3 remains the one that you want to use!