How to Automate PowerPoint Slidedecks with R

Written by Matt Dancho

Your boss lives on PowerPoint decks. Do you need to create a Slide Deck every week? Let’s learn how to automate PowerPoint with R, using officer and tidyverse.

This article is part of R-Tips Weekly, a weekly video tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to do common R coding tasks one R-tip at a time.

Here are the links to get set up. 👇

This Tutorial Is Available In Video

I have a companion video tutorial that shows even more secrets (plus mistakes to avoid). And, I’m finding that a lot of my students prefer the dialogue that goes along with coding. So check out this video to see me running the code in this tutorial. 👇

Automate PowerPoint with R

Here’s a common situation, you have to make a Monday Morning Slide Deck. It’s the same deck each week, just date ranges for your data change. Here’s how to automate this process with R!

First, here’s what you need to make - A weekly Stock Report.

Weekly Stock Report

Thinking like a programmer, you can collect your stock data using date ranges.

Stock Data Using Date Ranges

With a little bit of data wrangling with the tidyverse, you’ve got your table extracted & formatted!

Tidyverse Wrangling

Then you use timetk to make a sweet plot.

Timetk package

Plotting stock data

Then you use officer to add the table and plot to powerpoint.

Officer R package

You’ve just automated your Monday Morning PowerPoint in R. BOOM! 💥💥💥

Weekly Stock Report

💡 Conclusions

You learned how to automate PowerPoint with R. Great work! But, there’s a lot more to becoming a Business Scientist (my term for an incredibly valuable data scientist that has business skills).

If you’d like to become a Business Scientist (and have an awesome career, improve your quality of life, enjoy your job, and all the fun that comes along), then I can help with that.