Hey guys, I was just wondering if there was any way that y’all have figured out on how to export a flowchart to PowerPoint.
The trick is that an image won’t do, we’d need the nodes to actually be editable.
I imagine if there is a way, it would involve chaining together a bunch of steps with different pieces of software, which I’m open to doing if anyone has figured out something viable.
I’ve searched google for a while to no avail, so I was hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.
I guess what I’m asking is if through some rube goldberg series of steps we could turn those HTML elements, their text and their connections into shapes/nodes and connections in PowerPoint/ Google Slides that we could then manipulate as if we had built those flowcharts natively in those applications.
Not necessarily display the HTML directly, but interpret it and use it to rebuild the flowcharts and export them in an editable, fully functional .ppt format.
The problem is that interactivity might include selection, scrolling, zooming, moving nodes and links, drawing new links, copying nodes and links, deleting nodes and links, editing text, resizing or reshaping or rotating nodes, and many other behaviors. That requires JavaScript to execute to get the appearances and behaviors that people want.
I mean, in theory, if there was an API for PowerPoint/Google Slides, and you could parse the HTML file generated by GoJS and say “Okay, there’s a node at position X, Y, with dimensions A,B, and text content C. It’s connected by a line to nodes 2 and 3 which are at positions…”, and then take that information and use the API to then generate these nodes at those positions with those dimensions, contents, and connections in PowerPoint/Google Slides.
You would be recreating the flowchart in an exported ppt format by parsing the html, not needing to insert any javascript or web technology at all.
At least that’s how I think it could be done in theory, I admittedly have zero understanding of the technical challenges involved!