Mail Merge Functionality in Aspose.Slides for PowerPoint Presentations

Aspose.Slides Product Family
1

Does Aspose Slide support functionality mail merge like Aspose Word mail merge? If no, any alternative or work around for this

2

@Loc_le,

I have observed your requirements and regret to share that at present the requested support is unavailable in Aspose.Slides and an issue with ID SLIDESNET-39307 has already been created in our issue tracking system to provide requested support. This thread has been linked with the issue so that you may be notified once the issue will be fixed.

3

Hi @mudassir.fayyaz - Any update on this?

HI @Loc_le Did you find any alternate solution for this?

4

@mitesh.prajapati,
Mail Merge technology is missing in Aspose.Slides, and there’s a reason.

Mail merge is about combining a number of data sources for mass mailings to form a letter. This feature is usually employed in a word processing document which contains fixed text (which is the same in each output document) and variables (which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source). Some word processors can insert content from a database, spreadsheet, or table into text documents.

But over time, more complex concepts were introduced. Instead of simple text data, they began to use any data in fact (including binary ones).

PowerPoint is not a text editor per se, so there is no such feature as Mail Merge. However, it should be noted that there are third-party products that mimic the Mail Merge technology for PowerPoint, but they are all limited in their capabilities to varying degrees. Aspose.Slides, in turn, offers users an API that can be used to implement Mail Merge in the most appropriate way for the particular customer.

In general, the Mail Merge process requires the following steps:

  1. Create the main document (template).
  2. Create data source(s) to use for the merge.
  3. Define merge fields in the main document (template).
  4. Combine data with the main document.
  5. Save/export.

The presence of the API makes it possible to perform all the listed steps of the Mail Merge process and even more.

We add an example https://github.com/aspose-slides/Aspose.Slides-for-.NET/blob/master/Examples/CSharp/Presentations/Conversion/MailMergeExample.cs as a basic template of how Aspose.Slides API can be used to perform merge operations when a number of presentations are created based on a single template based on the data provided by the database.

The example is provided with comments that can be used to extend it for further needs.

5

Hi @Andrey_Potapov

We use Aspose for reporting purpose, so would not like to generate multiple files based on the data. We would be having only one template setup and would like to replace those tags in the report.

Example : {{first_name}} can be converted into Mitesh.

@Andrey_Potapov would you be able to provide any example for this?

Thanks,
Mitesh

6

@mitesh.prajapati,
Thank you for describing the issue. Could you please share a sample presentation?