Excel and PowerPoint - Part 2

To continue where I left off from the previous post. How do you animate a graph in PowerPoint when the graph is just window into Excel and not an actual PowerPoint graph?

Answer: You mask it with a bunch of white boxes and you set the exit animation. This method makes it look as if the chart is appearing, when in actuality it is the mask white box disappearing.

Obviously this isn't a perfect solution because things like axis lines are broken up and stuff, so it isn't really elegant, but it does the job.

If anyone has questions about anything Microstoft Office related, don't hesitate to ask it here.

Excel and PowerPoint

For the past year and a half, I have been working in a department that creates lots of powerpoint presentations. When I first got there, they had good presentations, but the data in them was not linked to all the data that was in their multitude of spreadsheets. So, how do you link all the data from the spreadsheets to the data in PowerPoint so you don't have to copy and paste data every time something changes?

NO ONE KNOWS! Seriously... Of all the great things that Microsoft Office provides, they don't let users link a cell or group of cells from Excel directly to a PowerPoint chart. This really stinks and Microsoft should fix it.

However, there is a solution that I use that does almost the same thing. The problem with my solution is that you can't get get chart animation quite as easily.

1. Get all the data from whatever source you have and put it into Excel
2. Remove the grid lines by choosing Tools --> Options --> General
3. Create the chart in Excel with all links to the data in Excel - I usually create the chart on a separate page.
4. Select the cell range around the chart (not the data). You are basically creating a "window into excel" and you are going to paste that window into PowerPoint. It's important to remember that your window is referencing a specific range in Excel. If you insert lines or columns, PowerPoint won't know that the chart might be in a different place now, so you may have to re-link it. This is why I usually put my chart on a separate worksheet from the data.
5. Go into your PowerPoint slide. Edit --> Paste Special... Links... Linked to Excel Workbook.

Voila! You have a spreadsheet chart in your PowerPoint presentation. Anytime the data changes, just right click on the link in PowerPoint and click "refresh".

Some people choose to embed the spreadsheet into PowerPoint. This works sometimes, but if you have a huge spreadsheet with 50 charts and graphs, that's a very large file. If you embed it 50 times into PowerPoint, that makes for an enourmous PowerPoint presentation. In addition, if your data comes from an external source (something that Excel linked to) it can cause refresh problems.

Now, how do you animate the chart if you don't want to show the whole thing all at once?

Come back soon for the continuation.