Embedding PowerPoint in a Dashboard

I have long sought to embed hi-res pictures in a dashboard without much success. The first try was a bit awkward. I even created a feature request asking for it. In the beginning, all I wanted was to create a picture slide show.

The epiphany took place a few days ago, that is, embedding a Slideshare widget in Tableau. Yes, that means, we can embed a PowerPoint in any Tableau dashboard via Slideshare, if that adds to the expressiveness of your data stories. How useful is this at all? You creative souls please tell me.

The steps are:

Step 1.Upload your PowerPoint to www.slideshare.net

Step 2.Get the url for the slideshare widget
-click the share button at the lower-left corner to view the embed code.
-copy the embed code to a notepad
-extract the url and add "https://" to it.

Step 3.Add a web object to your Tableau dashboard using the above url.

Here is an example embedding 3 PPTs. Click image to download the workbook.

To embed a photo album, insert photos to a PowerPoint file first. Then upload it to Slideshare.

Full Screen Control
After embedding the widget in Tableau, the fullscreen button lost its function. To make it up, I used an image object to cover the button and link the object to the full web browser view.

Security Control
BTW, there might be certain privacy or security concerns over uploading PPT to Slideshare.net. Slideshare provides some control over the content. Each set of the slides has a privacy settings you can edit and provide limited access to the content. One can generate a private link for the presentation. Basically, it hides the content from search engines. It is not perfect, but that's the best Slideshare can do.