Transcript

In this video, we’ll use Presentation Builder to generate slide decks for customer meetings. Major topics include adding data tags to a template and making changes to a generated presentation.

Presentation Builder is a tool within Totango to simplify the typical process of copying data and pasting into a slide deck–often having to re-build charts and graphs every time. Within a presentation template, Totango relies on data tags, which is coded language for account-level attributes. These tags, when inserted as placeholders in any PowerPoint deck, dynamically pull information from Totango so that you don’t have to recreate the wheel, each quarter, for every customer. Although, you can even create templates for specific customers to meet their branding and style requirements.

Let’s try it out. I actually have an upcoming Quarterly Business Review with one of my accounts. In the past, my process was to locate the presentation deck from the previous quarter, make a copy, and then start updating data, slide by slide. Now I can have Totango do most of this work for me! From the quick actions menu, I’ll choose Generate Presentation.

From here, I can choose from any previously uploaded templates or I can upload a new template. To be clear, the template we’re talking about must have placeholders for data tags in order to generate any dynamic data.

For training purposes, let’s back up and actually show you how to insert those tags into a template. However, before creating your own template, we recommend checking with your Totango administrator. There might already be a template already available to use as an asset in a SuccessBloc, which saves everyone on your team a lot of work.

The first step in creating a new template is to download data tags that are used for all accounts. The other option, rather than downloading, is to use the Data Tags Generator, which helps you isolate a particular tag as you work without having to download the whole list. This tool also comes in handy when you want to populate objects like charts and tables. Let’s keep these open on the side while we open any deck that we want to turn into a template. Wherever I have a text in my presentation that I want to auto-populate from Totango, I need to replace it with a data tag.

On our first slide, we have the account name. I’ll find the tag shortcut for Name, copy it, and paste it into my deck. I would make my way through this deck, replacing static text with data tags as I go. You can get creative here. Whatever data you keep about an account, you can represent it on a slide–like objectives from Success Plans, usage metrics, and more.

When I’m done, I save my work, and now I’m ready to upload this template into Totango. Once the template is uploaded, now I can use it over and over again. I just need to select it, and then tell Totango to get to work. After a few moments, the new presentation is available for me to view on the Assets tab of the account. (Since I happened to upload the template on this account as an example, it’s here as well.)

I can preview my new presentation from here, or I can download and open it in PowerPoint. Now I can make any necessary tweaks, including making changes to my chart types. Because Totango inserts chart data as Excel objects, you can make edits to the underlying data however you see fit.

Now that I made these edits, I should save this file under a new name before uploading back to the Assets tab, since this is another version. Come next quarter, I can use the same template, and in one click, generate a new file with the latest information from the account.