Creating a live link to Excel from Word or PowerPoint

The principle described in the previous part of this blog can apply when you copy or data between Excel and (say) Word or PowerPoint:

This PowerPoint presentation looks like it contains a PowerPoint image and chart, but actually they're just embedded objects from Excel.

You can see that the above is true when you look at the presentation's file size:

The presentation file size is by modern day standards tiny, because the real meat of the presentation is actually stored in Excel.

Creating a linked Excel object

It's easy to paste an Excel object into PowerPoint.  First copy the Excel range of data:

If you're copying a chart you'll need to select the cells surrounding it.

Choose to Paste Special:

PowerPoint	Word

Choose to paste the Excel range as a linked picture:

PowerPoint	Word

Editing a linked picture

To edit the Excel source for a linked picture, just double-click on it:

You can also right-click to use the short-cut menu shown above.

Updating links

When you open a presentation or document containing links to Excel, you will see a message similar to this:

This is the message for PowerPoint 2016.  To ensure you're using the latest version of the Excel source, click on Update Links.

And that concludes this blog, which was meant to be just about the camera tool but got a bit carried away with itself!