New Success Snapshot Builder - Feedback

Thanks for putting in the work on this @TMaier ! +100

Coming back in with a fresh round of feedback after playing with this again today.

• I don’t seem to be able to specify a background color for text boxes, which means anywhere I’d like to insert a token or add text over a colored background is a no-go.
• Adjusting the size of an image using the top-right handle freaks out and reduces the image/textbox to a sliver. Bottom right works fine.
• Adjusting images is, in general, very difficult. Even starting with two files of exactly the same size (let’s say squares of identical size) the process forces me to first insert a text box of not-that-size, and then add the image to it, and then try to reshape the now-distorted image. Doing this twice and having the end proportions match is nearly impossible.
• When working with text boxes and images, every time you click somewhere not on the selection box, the side options panel goes away and the entire screen resizes. This is jarring and annoying (sorry I couldn’t think of a more diplomatic way to phrase that but it is noteworthy).
• I cannot easily import slides in to an existing deck. This would at least allow me to leverage the editing in Powerpoint to make pleasant shapes etc and then insert the edited slide back in to the deck and save some headache. Adding even simple shapes is not possible in the Snapshot Builder.

Sorry one more…

• The slide selection on the left side of the window shows a thumbnail for each slide, but only the original slide - slides with content added in the Snaphshot Builder do not reflect those changes. Ex: if I take a blank slide and add an embedded report and text to it, it will still show up as a blank white slide. Very difficult to remember which slide is which after doing any amount of serious editing.

We also have a background text box color. What we did was insert a text box with the background color we wanted in the PPT template uploaded but trying to then add another text box for the actual text over the color was very glitchy. You pretty much have to get the size of the box, text formatting, and entered all in one go because if you click out of the text box there is no way to click back in and make edits. This required me to start over many times on our 1 slide PPT template. In hindsight we probably could have removed the color but then the slide doesn’t look as nice.

Adding to this list after going through some trial and error on my first template: 

• Limited control over text alignment when embedding a report into an element on a slide. Ideally we are able to center vertically and/or horizontally 
• Can’t delete elements once added - seems like a UI bug. I can select the element, but hitting the trashcan doesn’t do anything.
• If you need to make changes to original template, have to start over designing in GS - can’t pull incremental formatting changes from Drive. This is a nice to have - but If I add a new slide it would be great to refresh in GS to pull through. 
  • This is related to Thomas’ point that there are certain things you can do in PPT/Slides that you cannot add in the SS editor. For example, since you cannot see if an element is centered with the gridlines that Google Slides offers you likely want to do this in Slides and then import it instead of adding elements in SS itself. 
• Can’t show title of an embedded report so you have to add this in your template beforehand.
• Can’t filter report in the template - have to add a date filter on the report itself for example. This forces us to clone reports we already have on dashboards or 360 and create Success Snapshot versions filtered down to a date range that we want to show.
• Adding on to what Thomas said about graphical reports -- Graphs simply don’t fit in slides. You can see in my screenshots that two graphs on one page don’t fit. I tried adding one graph that takes up almost a full slide and you cannot see all data points, dates cutoff etc. IMO it should be smart enough to resize the graph to fit and also remove some of the surrounding white space. 

Snapping. If we could get snapping behavior when placing new elements on a slide, that would be dreamy.

Here to add on to the pile with my own experiences :)

1. You cannot insert user profile picture despite being able to select the label. It shows the image’s address in text form.
2. You cannot select the regular “Arial” font in the dropdown above despite it existing as a default font.
3. Once you add a Text Box from the top menu, you cannot delete it. You can only clear the content but the box annoyingly stays there to mess with you when you accidentally hover over it.
4. When you change certain style options in the Table Styles, saving the style fails. Noticed this happens always with unchecking “Alternate color for rows”.
5. Table Styles are limited in design, for example it is impossible to round table corners to fit company branding.
6. If you insert a KPI report and display it as a label, it is now impossible to center it and any text next to it within the text box.
7. If you insert a Gauge chart report it is inserted as an absolutely tiny image with most of the space being white useless padding.
8. You could at least work around a lot of styles if you could hide Report Column Names, but you cannot.
9. There is no integration with OneDrive so if you use the Microsoft Suite and PPT for your presentations you have to keep reuploading the file and creating numerous presentations in the repository.
10. Sometimes you go to change the slightest thing in your template and then you try to upload it on your existing presentation and it gives you an error that the “master slide cannot be generated”. I couldn’t figure out a consistent way to fix it 9 out of 10 times as the error is less than useful in telling me what went wrong.
11. It seems that if you export a report which had rich text field, that rich text will have completely botched formatting. The formatting isn’t simply removed, but rather the formatting that exists on the beginning is applied to everything. If the first sentence was underlined, now the whole text becomes underlined in the export.
12. Sometimes you will click on a text box with a label to write something else next to it, but it won’t get selected and you have to click again. Also sometimes you want to change the alignment of text, and you have to click the alignment button twice before the dropdown appears.
13. There is no “auto fit” text in reports, meaning single long text records can just get cut-off midway. E.g. if I want to display the activity description from the previous QBR we had with this client.

One thing I’ve noticed for deleting boxes is that they DO get deleted, but you have to switch to another slide and back for it to properly reflect the changes. You do have to make sure you’re using the “delete object” trashcan icon on the left vs the “delete contents” identical trashcan icon which appears on the right when you have your focus cursor inside an existing object.

@TMaier how do you get this “delete object” icon? I know what you mean that there are two positions for the trashcan depending on your focus, but in my efforts both of them say “Clear Text Box Data” and changing slide doesn’t seem to do anything extra for me. 

Just to be clear I am speaking about the completely fresh text boxes that you add using the button at the top, not the ones that you get when clicking on an existing element from the original PowerPoint template.

@TMaier @Tomas Trijonis @jsiudzinski_uber @jkolle - thank you for the detailed feedback. We will analyze the feedback and come up with next steps. FYI @arunabhat 

One more: if you add a Textbox in the Success Snapshot Builder, it is displayed on top but for selection purposes is always at the bottom compared to other PPT elements. You cannot bring it to top and if there was any PPT element in that same location it will always take selection priority over the Textbox. 

Honestly I am puzzled how the “2.0” has passed QA 😅.

Not sure if this is stated here. 

We are admins and dont memorize the content of the slides. If the CSMs made an update, sent the updated powerpoint file to admins, it would be nice if we just upload the file and get on with our lives. However, if the person who sent us an updated ppt changed the order of the slides, it wont really follow. I just learned that only the content of the slide will be updated. The order of the slides will remain the same. You will have to move the slides within the builder. Sometimes, you even have to save first, exit the builder, before making more changes to the deck.

+10 on this. I spent time trying to make it work but I first had trouble even being able to load slide(s) due to the 50MB limit on upload, then placing tokens is difficult due to size and placement, readability. After several attempts I pretty much gave up on using it. I think it definitely needs some enhancement on how it functions to make it useful for us. Too bad too because we could totally use this for a top pain point for our CSMs of spending too much time on slide decks populating data points.