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Understand Grunt's rule-based model and why it separates content from design

Grunt is a PowerPoint add-in for professionals who spend a lot of time building and updating slides.

#Why Grunt exists

When maintaining a presentation:

  • PowerPoint slides are often built from static shapes and text boxes.
  • Static slides are tedious to maintain when data changes.
  • Small content updates can force large manual layout changes.

Grunt takes a different approach by separating content from design.

#Separate data from design

In Grunt:

  • Data carries the values and structure.
  • Rules decide how that data should look.
  • Visual Grids combine the two into slide-ready output.

This lets you update the data without rebuilding the slide from scratch.

#Let the data drive the slide

Rules work like conditional formatting, extending from text styling to complete visualizations.

That means you can:

  • Apply formatting based on values
  • Stack multiple behaviors on top of each other
  • Reuse the same logic across many rows, columns, and objects

The result is faster updates and more consistent presentation output.

#Where to go next

Use Quick start to build your first Grunt object, then continue to Rules and Visual Grids.