Adding Visuals and Analytic data in Present Pro

Adding your visuals and analytics is probably the most important stage of populating each of your slides. It provides the analytic content that is at the heart of the data you want to share with your audience. You can either add existing visuals that have been saved to content manager or you can create one-off visuals that only exist within this presentation and cannot be reused by other users or in other presentations using Smart Present or Discover Lite.

Important: The options described in this section do not result in an "unchangeable outcome." If you decide to create a one-off visual in your presentation, you can easily change it into a shared visual at a later date using the Make Shareable option on the right-click context menu. Likewise, if you decide to add a shared visual from the content management system, you can unlink it from its parent (making it into a one-off visual) using the Unlink option on the Component ribbon.

Adding existing visuals

You can add existing visuals from the various apps (discoveries from Discover, visual areas from Tabulate, infographics from Illustrate, and so on) to your presentation, as long as they have been saved to the content management system in a location that you can access. You are advised to re-use content as much as possible as this ensures that you are always including the latest underlying analytic data from your team in your presentation. Note that using linked visuals means that any future changes to that original visual will be reflected in your presentation.

Unlinking visuals

When you add an existing visual to your presentation, you are adding a visual that is "linked to" a parent discovery in Discover. You can unlink the visual at any time, making the visual that is included in the presentation a copy of the visual that continues to exist in the content management system and saving it as part of the presentation. Note that unlinking your visual means that any future changes to that original visual will not be reflected in your presentation.

Creating and embedding new visuals

You can create a new visual and embed it directly into your presentation, either using Smart Reporting or Discover Lite. These are both easy-to-use design-time tools, but whereas Smart Reporting does most of the work of creating your visual for you, Discover Lite provides access to more functionality to let you customize your visual to your own requirements. Once your visual is built, clicking Finish embeds it into the presentation.

Tip: Don't worry about choosing "the wrong" option. Once you have created your visual using either of these tools, you can open it up in Discover from the right-click menu to edit it at any time.

Smart Reporting

Smart reporting provides a highly simplified, wizard-like process for building visuals that are then saved and embedded within your presentation. Smart Reporting is a good solution for those users who want to build their visuals quickly and want to allow the wizard to design the visual (selecting the appropriate visualization type, for example) on their behalf.

Discover Lite

Discover Lite offers a streamlined interface and a slimmed-down range of Discover functionality but offers more flexibility and sophistication than Smart Reporting. It is a "happy medium" between the full Discover Pro experience and the simplified Smart Reporting experience. Discover Lite is a good solution for those users who want to retain close control of the editing functions available for building their visuals.