Report Cleaner

Professional reports often contain errors that are difficult and cumbersome to identify manually. Use the Report Cleaner to check your report for common errors and ensure a clean, consistent look.

Best practice

Always use the Report Cleaner before sending reports to third parties.

Starting and restarting the Report Cleaner

To start the Report Cleaner use the toggle button in the ribbon. If the Report Cleaner is active, the button will appear pressed (see the above picture).

To restart the Report Cleaner, click again on the Report Cleaner button in the ribbon to deactivate the currently active Report Cleaner and click once more to start a new Report Cleaner.

Working with the Report Cleaner in the taskpane

All available clean actions are shown in the task pane:

Different buttons are available depending on the clean action:

Find next: shows the next finding (if any). If nothing is found, slideRush will ask you if you want to restart the search at the beginning of the presentation.
Ignore shape for this clean type: the currently selected shape will no longer be checked for the active clean action. This is especially useful for the clean actions “Shapes Outside of Slide” and “Strongly Overlapped Shapes”.
Clean selection: slideRush will try to clean the currently selected shape for the active clean action (e.g. remove excess whitespace).
Clean all: slideRush will try to clean the full presentation for the active clean action (e.g. harmonize deviating spelling languages).

For some clean actions slideRush will try to highlight the findings in the affected shape in red. These highlights will be automatically removed when changing the shape selection or jumping to the next finding.

Availables Clean Actions

• Unwanted slideRush Elements: finds the following items:
  • Linked ranges and linked charts inserted as placeholders
  • Linked text that is linked to blank Excel cells
  • Linked text that is linked to Excel cells resulting in errors
  • Linked ranges, linked charts and linked text that were not found in the Excel file during the last update (i.e. missing)
• Shapes outside of slide: finds shapes that are partially or fully located outside of slide borders
• Remove excess whitespace: finds excess whitespace in text. Excess whitespace is defined as multiple whitespace characters in a row (e.g. multiple spaces) or whitespace at the beginning of a bullet list.
• Unbalanced punctuation: finds unbalanced character pairs, e.g. for parentheses or quotation marks.
• Remove highlights: finds text highlighted with the regular PowerPoint highlighting functionality as well as text and shapes highlighted with slideRush’s quick highlight or full highlight.
• Font differences: a font difference is defined as different font sizes or different font types within a single shape.
• Strongly overlapped shapes: finds shapes that are likely difficult to see for the reader because they are fully or partially covered by other shapes.
• Find duplicate words: finds duplicate words, e.g. “and and”.
• Remove document properties: removes all document properties from the active presentation. Compared to the built-in PowerPoint document inspector this clean action performs a much more thorough cleaning.
• Deviating spelling language: typically only one spelling language is used in reports (e.g. English). When copying or inserting texts or items from external sources (e.g. websites), deviating spelling languages might be introduced to the presentation. To harmonize the spelling languages use this cleaning action.
• Remove alt texts: alt texts are used to describe images for visually impaired readers. Use this feature to reduce file size but consider your target audience before removing alt texts.
• Remove animations: removes all slide transitions and shapes animations.
• Remove unused designs: removes unused presentation designs to reduce file size.
• Remove notes: removes all slide notes from the presentation.
• Remove comments: removes all comments from the presentation.
• Remove unused layouts: removes unused slide layouts from the presentation master(s).
• Remove all bookmarks: removes all slideRush bookmarks from the presentation (except for bookmarks on slide status bars).
• Remove all slide statuses: removes all slideRush slide statuses.