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Question

PowerPoint to database


tim_bkr
Participant
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Hello,

I've got a really challenging question received from a customer !

The domain is Heritage buildings protection.

An architect/historian evaluates the value of buildings and gives them a mark.

He then presents his proposal in a PowerPoint :

  • Identification info
  • Description
  • Mark
  • Label
  • etc.
  • Pictures

The proposal is reviewed in several sessions, with different people. The mark may be upgraded or downgraded, the label changed, etc.

 

Once validated, the data is to be captured in an SDE geodatabase. Presently, this is done in two different ways :

  1. Manually
  2. Manually copying the data to Excel and it is imported in GDB with FME

But in both cases, there is a non profit-adding step, which is to manually copy the data.

Does anyone out there have an idea how to skip this step ?

Could the PowerPoint presentation be structured in such a way (with keywords for instance) that could make the content recognizable and importable directly ?

I have thought of different ways but I'd rather keep it open for your input !

Kind regards,

Tim

 

5 replies

mark2atsafe
Safer
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  • Safer
  • April 27, 2023

The quick solution would seem to be to save the Powerpoint as a PDF file and have FME read that. FME has a PDF reader, but it doesn't have one for Powerpoint (only a writer).


mark2atsafe
Safer
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  • Safer
  • April 27, 2023
mark2atsafe wrote:

The quick solution would seem to be to save the Powerpoint as a PDF file and have FME read that. FME has a PDF reader, but it doesn't have one for Powerpoint (only a writer).

The other solution would be for the historian to capture the data directly in Excel. FME can then turn that into a Powerpoint, AND convert it to Geodatabase.


tim_bkr
Participant
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  • Author
  • Participant
  • April 28, 2023

Thanks @mark2atsafe !

Yeah, your second option seems interesting but the historians wouldn't be independent in their work... Not sure they'll like that.


dallqes
Participant
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  • Participant
  • July 2, 2025

I had a similar need and found that the slide structure made it tricky to extract clean data. I ended up using a mix of OCR and manual tagging. For better planning visuals from the database side later, I also tried www.officetimeline.com—it helped with turning raw info into timeline slides once the data was sorted out.


crutledge
Influencer
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  • Influencer
  • July 2, 2025

@tim_bkr I know the original post is a few years out but this just popped up. I think this would be a perfect application for the BetterReportGenerator just released by ​@alexbiz 

 


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