How I automated a 300+ page Google Slides presentation

I want you to think of something that you've had to do for work that is just so repetitive it's mind-numbing, the kind of task that takes hours. It's gruesome, and you're just imagining anything else you could be doing with your time. In today's video, I'm going to be talking about an example of a task that I covered in an organization I'm a part of and how we automated that task to earn us hours and hours back.

For this example, I am the President of the American Advertising Federation of Greater Rochester. It is a regional organization that is part of a much larger organization. Each year, we host a large award show, and as part of the show, we invite agencies, in-house marketers, freelancers, and students to submit work. We then have a judging process that selects the best of the best, and we host an award show where two, three, or even four hundred people come out to celebrate and recognize that work.

As part of the award show, we create a showbook. The showbook contains slides for each of the winning entries, as well as submitted work, with hundreds of names of creatives, agencies, clients, students, and advisors. It includes screenshots of the work and other images. It’s hundreds of pages long—a huge digital showbook that used to be printed. Every year, when we host the show, the team spends hours and hours creating this showbook.

Of course, me being me, when I saw how much of a task this was to create, I identified a way to automate a significant portion of it. Each one of these pages likely takes an estimated five minutes to create. The last time I checked, we had 300 pages. If you take five minutes and multiply it by 300, that’s 1,500 minutes. Divide that by 60, and that’s about 25 hours of work. The process I introduced reduced that to hours or even less.

What I’m going to show you today is a specific example of how I took on this automation challenge, the process I followed, and the tools I used. While you may not be creating a showbook yourself, my hope is that this serves as an example of identifying tasks in your own work that are time-consuming and repetitive. My goal is to help you find ways to earn back hours or even weeks of your time so you can focus on work that truly matters.

So let’s jump into it.

Here we are in my copy of the showbook. There is no sensitive information here; I have replaced everything with dummy data for this demo. This showbook was traditionally done in PowerPoint, but I moved it into Google Slides so the team could easily make edits and changes. We have all of our slides, including title slides, detail slides with information, introductory slides for myself and our board, and beautifully designed slides by Maria from Rinato Studio. These slides go between our detail slides.

If we scroll down, we see an example of a detailed slide. The text information comes from Google, while the background contains predesigned, formatted slides. These slides have different layouts for the screenshots or photos of the work, depending on the type of entry. For example, a silver award entry has a specific layout.

You might be wondering: how do we get our actual information into these slides? That’s our goal, and with hundreds of these slides, we need to do it efficiently. What we’ve done is turn these slides into templates. Here is the same slide, but instead of static text, we’ve added placeholders in brackets to indicate dynamic information. We’ve done this for the title, agency, client, names, and roles, up to 20 individuals per entry.

To ensure this template doesn’t appear in the final showbook, we mark it as a skipped slide in Google Slides. That way, it won’t be included when we download or share the presentation.

Next, we have an Airtable base. Airtable is similar to a spreadsheet but has more advanced functionality. I extracted only the relevant data from a complex Excel file and brought it into Airtable. Here, I have 10 dummy records, but in reality, there are 300. I ensured the column names in Airtable match the placeholders in Google Slides, so everything aligns properly.

Now, the question is: how do we get this data into Google Slides? The tool I used for this automation is called Make. Make is similar to Zapier in that it allows for “if this, then that” automation. In Make, I built a scenario that triggers when a new record appears in Airtable. It retrieves the record and creates a slide in Google Slides based on the template.

To show you how this works, I will trigger the automation. The scenario fires, and within moments, a new slide is created in our showbook. Instead of manually creating each slide, this process handles it automatically, saving significant time.

Now, let’s build this automation from scratch. First, I set up a webhook in Make, which listens for changes in Airtable. Then, I retrieve the record from Airtable and create a new slide in Google Slides using a template. I match each field from Airtable to the placeholders in Google Slides.

This setup takes some initial effort, but once completed, it eliminates the need for manual slide creation. It’s important to double-check the field mappings because any mistake here will be replicated across all slides. To prevent errors, I added an error handler to retry if something goes wrong. Additionally, I enabled sequential processing, ensuring slides are created one at a time to maintain order.

To further streamline the process, I created a script in Airtable that automatically checks the trigger box for all 360 records. This means I don’t have to manually trigger the automation for each record—it runs sequentially, creating slides every three seconds instead of taking five minutes per slide.

Watching this automation in action is incredibly satisfying. Tasks that used to take 25 hours now take just minutes. This approach can be applied to other repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more meaningful work.

I hope you found this video helpful. This automation saved our team hours of work, allowing us to focus on higher-level tasks. More importantly, it saves time year after year, compounding the benefits over time.

If you enjoyed this video, I’d love for you to like, share it with a friend, coworker, or boss, and subscribe to the channel for more content like this. See you in the next one.

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