This utility lets you generate a power-point presentation that presents stimuli. You should provide the template for your presentation as a .pptx file, and the list of stimuli as an .xlsx file. See below detailed explanations how to prepare these files.
If you found this utility useful for your study, please cite us as:
Dotan, D. (2021). Powerpoint experiment generator . Tel Aviv University.
How to use this page?
PPTX Experiment Generator expects two input files:
- A template for a power-point presentation. The file includes a “template slide” that defines what a trial should look like (e.g. which stimuli appear, their position, any animation, etc.). If you have different trial types, each of which looks different, you can have several template slides, one for each trial type.
- An Excel file with a list of the trials. At present, this list of trials can only indicate text values to insert in the slide.
PPTX Experiment Generator will combine the two files and create a power-point presentation with one slide per trial.
Preparing the power-point template
The template is a pptx file. The file should have no slides at all; it only includes each trial type as a “slide template”. In power-point, choose “slide master” in the “view” toolbar. In the list of slides, you will see all slide templates. In this example, I put 2 templates because I had 2 trial types:
If you open slide master in a new pptx file, you will see many slide templates. Delete all of them and keep only the template-slides you want (but do not delete the top slide, which serves as the “parent” for all template slides).
To prepare each slide template, you should insert a placeholder for each text box you want to appear in the slide:
After inserting it, type in the placeholder its name. Later, when specifying the list of trials in the xlsx file, you will use this name to determine which text will appear for each trial. Make sure you type the placeholder name exactly as it appears in the Excel file, with no excessive SPACE characters, right-to-left/left-to-right confusions, etc. – otherwise, PPTX Experiment Generator will not be able to find the correct placeholder.
In this sample slide, I added 2 placeholders, called “target1” and “target2”:
Preparing the list of trials
The list of trials should be provided as an xlsx file with one line per trial.
The xlsx file should have the following columns. First, it will have a “layout” column. The value in this column determines which template slide to use for each trial (1 = first template slide, 2 = second, etc.).
On top of that, the xlsx file will have one column for each placeholder that you inserted in any of your template slides. The column header should be the same as the placeholder name.
You can find here a sample template and the corresponding trial-list file.