Link Excel Data to PowerPoint Charts: A Complete Guide

Computers are highly versatile tools, yet sometimes we neglect them by not taking the time and flexibility to improve our digital workflows. As a matter of fact, you can often find ways to vastly optimize your productivity by looking at ways to improve the command of your favorite programs. In addition, you can find ways to send data from one app to another.

Case in point, here we’re showing you how to bridge the gap between Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. It’s easier than you might imagine. It will save you much time and grief – while also allowing you to come up with rather creative new solutions to old problems.

What Are The Main Benefits Of Linking Excel And Powerpoint?

Superior accessibility and improved organization are the key benefits of transferring data from an Excel spreadsheet to a Powerpoint slide. Depending on the complexity of the presentation you’re putting together and the intricacy of the Excel spreadsheet sourcing the data, improving the organization and accessibility of your workflow can indeed translate into saving tremendous amounts of time and energy, which you can reroute to fine-tuning your presentation as well as making your points more robust and data-driven.

Learning how to do so will also help streamline your presentations and allow you to stay focused on the points you need to make. This is because you won’t have to jump back and forth between the two apps when standing in front of the audience. The result is a more seamless, tidy, and focused delivery.

This is because you will just need to deal with your Powerpoint slides with embedded charts that are automatically populated from an Excel source file.

This also means that while you’re putting together the presentation slides, you will be able to organize your research data separately. The changes will be automatically reflected in your Powerpoint presentation.

While Excel and Powerpoint are two very different programs that we tend to ascribe to wildly different uses, the truth is they are made by the same company as part of the same software suite – and they are indeed created from the ground up to fully integrate with one another when needed.

As such, sending Excel data to a Powerpoint file does not require any patches or workarounds; it simply involves learning to use some of the less-known core functionalities of both apps.

What Is The Easiest Method To Link Excel To Powerpoint?

Adding data from your Microsoft Excel worksheet to your Powerpoint presentation simply involves learning how to use a single tool available in the latter app. The feature in question can be accessed from the “Insert” tab which you will find on the ribbon along the upper side of the screen.

From your opened Microsoft Powerpoint presentation, just click “Insert” and navigate to the “text” menu, then look for the “Object” feature which you’ll find in the rightmost area of the menu. When you click there, a new dialog titled “Insert Object” will pop up, from where you can open the Excel file containing your source data, as well as navigate to a specific Excel workbook, and from there choose the specific Excel sheet you want and select the relevant fields that you wish to embed into that field in your presentation.

That is about the gist of the matter, and even though it’s an extremely simple procedure it’s also highly versatile. You can use this method to source data from as many Excel charts as you need into a single PowerPoint presentation. You can retrieve specific fields from the source and include them in the exact spot you want on any given side.

Since the data is subsequently populated dynamically, that means that once you have linked two fields across separate documents, you can then proceed to work separately in your Excel chart. Just as long as you remain aware not to tamper with the fields that forward the required data to your presentation, everything will keep working perfectly.

You can certainly tinker with the source data and even use complex equations to produce dynamic data. However, be sure to isolate the results in a group of cells that will then be sent to your presentation automatically.