Responding to an RFx in PowerPoint format

RFx in Word, Excel, or PDF format tend to be norm. Sometimes, you might be instructed to respond directly in the RFx template the customer sent to you (this is often the case for questionnaires in Excel format), and other times, you’re free to respond in your own beautifully branded template.

It’s a lot more rare to receive an RFx in PowerPoint format and to also be instructed to respond in that same PowerPoint template. If that does happen however, even though Auto Answer is not available in the QorusDocs Add-in for PowerPoint, there is a relatively simple work around which we’ll explain here in this article.

Before you can use the magic of AI with Auto Answer, your QorusDocs should have at least one Auto Answer content source configured. You can learn more about how that works here. Then, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll also need to have the QorusDocs Add-in installed.

In this article you will learn how to:

1. Copy the questions from PowerPoint to Excel
2. Respond using Auto Answer in Excel
3. Copy the answers from Excel to PowerPoint

1.    Copy the questions from PowerPoint to Excel

You may receive an RFP in PowerPoint format where the questions are presented in tabular form a bit like this:

With tabular layouts, the format lends itself well to responding in Excel. To do this, first select the questions in the PowerPoint slide then right-click and Copy:

Then, paste the selected questions in an Excel workbook:

Before using Auto Answer, you can clean up the formatting a little so it’s easier to see the questions and where the answers should go. Here, we made the column wider, and then clicked on ‘wrap text’:

The layout will then be adjusted as follows:

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2. Respond using Auto Answer in Excel

Next, select the questions and go over to the ‘Answer’ pane in the QorusDocs Add-ins to use Auto Answer. To understand how to set the ‘Answer’ preferences so that the answers get inserted below the questions. Click here.

If there are any custom Smart Fields in your Q&A content, fill in the Smart Field form and then click “Insert”.

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3. Copy the answers from Excel to PowerPoint

Once you're satisfied that you have all the answers to your questions, you can copy each answer individually from Excel...:

…and paste it in PowerPoint, directly in the RFP table, below the relevant question:

Or you can select all the answers in bulk while holding down the CTRL key before copying the answers.

…and pasting them into PowerPoint:

As you do this, you may find that you need to adjust the formatting of your response. For instance, in this example, the length of our answers caused the table to overflow off the slide:

To fix this, we duplicated the slide and then split the table in half, so that part 1 would be on one slide and part two on another.

You might experience a similar issue or a completely different formatting challenge. The good news though is that you have access to the full range of functionality PowerPoint has to offer to get your formatting right in relatively few clicks.

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