today i want to show you how you can link an excel spreadsheet to a powerpoint presentation this way when your data updates in microsoft excel it’ll also automatically update in your powerpoint presentation and the kevin cookie company i’m on point for pulling together our quarterly performance review the slides themselves don’t change but the underlying data does usually i have to go into excel and that’s where i’ll update the data and then i have to manually copy and paste it from excel into powerpoint that takes a lot of time and there are better things that i could be doing like pulling together more youtube videos luckily there is a better way let’s check it out here i am in powerpoint and this is the deck that we used last quarter once again the slides themselves are not changing it’s only the underlying data that has changed as a quick aside if you want to create one of these fun cartoon characters that you see on the side of the slide i’ve included a link to a video right up above that’ll show you step by step how to do it now right here this table in powerpoint i want to update it in excel and those updates will automatically flow through to powerpoint without me having to touch anything let’s jump into excel here i see my source data in excel i’m going to highlight the table and click on copy now let’s go back over to powerpoint in powerpoint let’s go to the top left hand corner and click on the drop down under paste then select paste special here let’s select paste link and then i can paste it as a microsoft excel worksheet object and look at that i now have my table in microsoft powerpoint but big deal i had that before but wait the magic is about to happen here now i have excel and powerpoint open side by side here i’ll just update one of the numbers in excel and look at that it immediately shows up in powerpoint here i’ll take the q2 numbers and i’ll paste them into my sheet and there too in powerpoint the entire table automatically updates without requiring me to do anything in powerpoint if i want to make any changes to the table within powerpoint i can simply double click on the table and this will open up the source excel sheet then i can make whatever changes i want and they’ll automatically flow back into powerpoint one of the downsides with this approach is if i want to make any formatting changes so let’s say i want to change the color or maybe the fonts or the font sizes i have to make all of those changes in excel once i make the changes in excel they’ll flow through to powerpoint however i can’t make any of these formatting changes directly within powerpoint on the next slide i have the exact same data but this time it’s in a chart format basically a visual way to view these same data right now this chart is disconnected from my excel data so once again if a change happens in excel it won’t update the chart i want to connect the two let’s go to excel within excel i’m going to copy the chart and then let’s go back to powerpoint back within powerpoint let’s go up to the top left hand corner and once again let’s click on the drop down under paste here we have a few different options for pasting this chart we can embed the chart but the problem with embedding is it won’t be connected to the original data in excel here are two different options where we can link to the source data the first one uses the destination theme so basically the theme that i have in my powerpoint presentation the next option allows me to use the source theme basically the look and feel that i have in excel i’ll select the second option and this way it’ll now be linked to the source data i once again have powerpoint open side by side with excel when i make changes to the data in excel look at that my chart automatically updates to reflect the latest changes if for whatever reason the chart doesn’t reflect the latest changes you can click on the chart and then go to the options on the top ribbon and then you can manually click on refresh and this will pull in the latest changes now what if i want to update my chart and unlike with the table where you could simply double click on it with charts you have to right click on the chart and within the context menu you can select the option edit data this will open up excel where you can make changes and then those changes will flow through to your chart with charts it only links the data so if you make any formatting changes in excel those won’t flow through into powerpoint so you have to make all of your chart formatting changes either before you link the chart to powerpoint or once you bring your chart into powerpoint there are some pretty robust chart formatting tools now this differs from tables where you have to make all of the formatting changes in excel all right well this is sure to make my life a lot easier and i’m sure it’s going to help me save a lot of time so maybe this way i could work on even more youtube videos to see more excel tutorial videos you can check out the playlist right up above please consider subscribing and i’ll see you next time [Music]