💡 New script: slides-report-generator (automated Slides presentations from Sheets data)

[github-actions[bot]]

Summary

A new catalog script that generates or refreshes Google Slides presentations from a Sheets data source using a template slide deck. Placeholder tokens in text boxes ({{revenue}}, {{date}}, {{summary}}) are replaced with current data values on a configurable schedule. Targets business reporting, weekly team updates, and status presentations that currently require manual copy-paste from spreadsheets.

Market Signal

Google Slides has no native data-refresh mechanism beyond manually linked charts, which only handle chart objects — not text, narrative content, or formatted tables. Paid tools like E-Tabs serve the enterprise report-automation market at premium price points. Google's own BigQuery → Sheets → Slides Codelab validates the data-to-presentation pipeline as a recommended pattern. Multiple 2026 tutorials and YouTube videos demonstrate GAS-based Slides generation, confirming persistent demand — but no packaged, deploy-ready open-source solution exists. The SlidesApp API supports replaceAllText() natively, making the core implementation straightforward.

User Signal

The existing idea backlog has zero Google Slides proposals — the second-largest uncovered Workspace service after Docs (now addressed by docs-template-merge). Operations managers, sales teams, and executives routinely create weekly or monthly status decks by manually copying numbers from Sheets into Slides. This is exactly the repetitive-task elimination the project's mission targets. The deploy page's zero-code positioning makes this accessible to non-technical users who currently spend hours on manual presentation updates every reporting cycle.

Technical Opportunity

SlidesApp is a mature GAS service with Presentation.replaceAllText() methods that make placeholder replacement straightforward across all slides in a deck simultaneously. The existing deploy page already has a Sheets picker (used by calendar-to-sheets) and a Drive file picker (used for Doc selection). Adding a Slides template picker to the Step 4 config panel follows the proven UI pattern with minimal new code. The architecture supports one-template-many-refreshes via scheduled triggers (e.g., every Monday at 6 AM). As a future enhancement, Gemini could generate narrative summaries from data trends to fill {{analysis}} placeholders.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	high	SlidesApp.replaceAllText() is well-documented. Deploy page picker components reusable. Core implementation is a direct analog of docs-template-merge.
Impact	high	Fills the Slides coverage gap entirely. Addresses a high-frequency pain point (weekly/monthly reporting) for business users. No free open-source competitor.
Urgency	med	The gap is stable but the combination of Workspace Studio (which generates content conversationally but not from templates) and rising AI expectations makes a template-based approach increasingly differentiated.

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: Text replacement is simple, but the real value in business reporting is charts and dynamic tables — which are much harder to automate. A text-only MVP may feel underwhelming compared to paid tools like E-Tabs. Workspace Studio flows may cannibalize this use case with native Gemini-powered content generation.

Rebuttal: The MVP scope is deliberately narrow: text placeholder replacement for status numbers, dates, and summary text. This alone eliminates the most common manual copy-paste work — the numbers that change weekly. Chart updates can be Phase 2 using Sheets-linked charts that auto-refresh when underlying data changes. Workspace Studio generates content conversationally but doesn't produce formatted, branded presentations from fixed templates — that requires the deterministic, repeatable template-replacement approach. The differentiator is repeatability: a branded deck refreshed every Monday morning, automatically, with exactly the layout and branding the team expects.

Suggested Next Step

Prototype: build a minimal slides-report-generator that reads a named Sheets range, replaces {{placeholders}} in a template Slides deck, and saves the refreshed copy to a configured Drive folder. Validate that SlidesApp.openById() + replaceAllText() handles the core use case within GAS execution limits.