Toolbox

The Present Pro toolbox, to the left-hand side of the canvas, lets you access key functions when building your presentation. These functions mostly let you add content items to the presentation; creating slicers, adding text, and even building new visuals on-the-fly. You will use these options when building the content for each of your slides.

  • For more general information about the workspace, see Workspace

Toolbox options

Selection / Interactions

The selection options (green highlight) control what your cursor does when you select items on the canvas.

Function

Description

Default Selector

The default selector option. When this option is selected, clicking an item on the canvas selects it.

Formatting Selector

Format selected items on the canvas. When this option is selected, the canvas transforms into an intuitive, point-and-click formatting area. Hover your cursor over the content items on the canvas to highlight them for selection; then, once selected, make your changes from the Formatting panel.

Interaction Picker

Show and manage interactions associated with selected content items. When this option is selected, clicking an item on the canvas displays the interactions to or from that item, and lets you create an interaction by dragging to the target item.

Auto layout

Function

Description

Auto Layout (purple arrow)

Use AI to rearrange the content items on your canvas according to one of the preset auto layout templates. Clicking this button opens the layout sub-menu containing the layout options for selection.

Basic items

The basic options (brown highlight) let you add text (including variable text), images, and shapes to your presentation.

Function

Description

Add Text Field

Add a text field to your presentation. These can include simple values like publication dates or the slide name or number, or more extensive content-like tables of contents or AI-generated Slide Insights.

Clicking this button opens the text field submenu, containing the options for selection. Select an option and click on the canvas to add a text box containing a variable token to the slide that will be replaced at runtime with values from your presentation, your model, or generated by Pyramid using the underlying LLM.

Import Images

Import saved images into your presentation. Tip: This can help you to achieve the appropriate branding for your presentation.

Text Fields

Add static text to your presentation. Tip: You may want to add titles and descriptions to your presentation.

Shapes

Add shapes to your presentation. Note: You can choose between shape presets, and then set the border and fill color as needed.

Layout containers

The layout container options (pale blue highlight) allow you to add multiple content items to your slide within a "container." For example, allowing you to add a container with three visuals, each of which is accessed at runtime using the tabs.

Function

Description

Dynamic Web Panels

Add a panel to your slide that displays a web page when the presentation is launched at runtime. This page can be static, displaying the content at a given URL, or can be dynamic, responding to user selections from slicers or visuals at runtime. A dynamic panel is enabled using a PQL expression that describes the action to take when a slice or visual element is selected.

Matrix Tables

Add a table that displays visuals, dynamic images, text, slicers, buttons, images, and web panels in one view. This feature is commonly used to create KPI scorecards or to compare details (for example, sales details for each of the last three months) as a matrix table.

Mini-Tabs

Add a tabbed panel that displays multiple visuals and other assets on separate tabs that your users can navigate between at runtime. Using a tabbed layout allows each asset to use the full real estate of the available panel.

Scrollable Panels

Add a scrollable panel that displays multiple content items on a single slide at runtime. Using a scrollable layout allows your user to view more items in one space than you have real estate to accommodate; they simply scroll to see more of the assets in the scrollable panel.

Slicers

Function

Description

Add New Slicer (yellow arrow)

Build a new slicer on-the-fly and add it to your presentation. A slicer added in this way is a basic slicer, where only the model and elements are selected on creation. To create an advanced slicer, where you can select default options, slicer limits, and so on, you can either use the Advanced Slicer option in the presentation ribbon or you can create a basic slicer and then edit its details from the right-click Slicer Settings menu.

Content items

The Add content item options (dark blue highlight) are used to add visuals to your presentation that were created on-the-fly for this presentation.

Function

Description

Smart Reporting

Build a one-off visual on-the-fly and embed that visual into your current presentation. The AI-driven Smart Reporting tool offers you the quickest and simplest method of creating a visual; you select data, and the tool decides what type of visualization (pie chart, grid, and so on) to create on your behalf. Once created, you can edit some of the formatting associated with the visual, including the visualization type.

Discover Lite

Build a one-off visual on-the-fly and embed that visual into your current presentation. In this case, the tool used is a Lite version of Discover. This provides more technical users with a more powerful tool to build and format visuals on-the-fly.

Note: In Present Pro, you can add existing visuals and visual areas to your presentation from the Content panel. For more information, see Adding existing visuals in Present Pro.