The Scenario
You're a creative director and your team is reviewing a 12-slide campaign presentation built in Google Slides. The account team, copywriters, and designers all need to weigh in on slide status — but they live in Excel all day and nobody remembers to open the presentation and click through it. If the slide thumbnails lived in an Excel workbook with a status column next to them, the review would actually happen.
The bad version:
- Open the presentation
- Click slide 1, right-click, look for a download option, find there isn't a direct thumbnail export in the UI
- Try the File > Download route, get the full slide as a PNG, resize it, upload it somewhere, copy a link
- Repeat for 11 more slides
- Paste 12 links into the workbook manually, try to remember which link corresponds to which slide number
- Wonder whether a link you pasted three slides ago will still work after the presentation is updated
Twelve slides. Twelve manual thumbnail extractions. Then someone updates slide 4 and the thumbnail you pulled is already wrong.
The team is reviewing a stale artifact before the meeting even starts.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook context and, through its Google Slides integration, can fetch per-slide thumbnail URLs from a presentation and write them into your spreadsheet — ready for your team to review alongside status columns.
Get the thumbnail URLs for all slides in my Google Slides presentation and paste them into my Excel sheet, one per row, with the slide number in column A and the image URL in column B starting at row 2
What You Get
- One row per slide, with the slide index number in column A and the thumbnail URL in column B
- All 12 rows written in a single operation — no manual copying
- Thumbnail URLs linking directly to the current version of each slide
- Column C left open for your team to add status labels or comments
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The presentation has been reorganized since you last pulled thumbnails
Slides were reordered and new ones were added, so your existing rows are stale.
Clear columns A and B in my Excel workbook starting from row 2, then fetch fresh thumbnail URLs for all slides in the presentation with ID in cell A1 and write the updated slide index and URL for each slide
You only need thumbnails for slides 3 through 8 for the review
The first two are title and agenda slides the team doesn't need to comment on.
Fetch thumbnail URLs only for slides 3 through 8 in the presentation with ID in cell A1 and write the slide index and URL to columns A and B in my Excel workbook starting at row 2
The workbook needs a title column populated from the slide titles
You want column C to show the slide title so reviewers can identify slides without opening the link.
Fetch the slide index, thumbnail URL, and slide title for each slide in the presentation with ID in cell A1, write them to columns A, B, and C in my Excel workbook starting at row 2
Kill chain: pull thumbnails, add status dropdown labels, and protect the URL column
Fetch thumbnail URLs for all slides in the presentation with ID in cell A1 and write slide index, URL, and slide title to columns A, B, and C in my Excel workbook starting at row 2. In column D, add a dropdown data validation with options: "Not started," "In review," "Approved," "Needs revision." Leave column E blank for written comments.
The workbook is now a full review tracker, not just a list of links.
Try It
Open an Excel workbook where you want the slide review tracker to live and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI, then paste the presentation ID into cell A1 and ask it to build the tracker. Also useful: building a slide deck from an Excel table or the Google Slides overview.