Author: Hayley Milliman / Source: howtogeek.com
Sometimes, you want to include the data on an Excel spreadsheet in a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. There are a couple of ways to do this, depending on whether or not you want to maintain a connection with the source Excel sheet. Let’s take a look.
What’s the Difference Between Linking and Embedding?
You actually have three options for including a spreadsheet in a PowerPoint presentation. The first is by simply copying that data from the spreadsheet, and then pasting it into the target document. This works okay, but all it really does is convert the data to a simple table in PowerPoint. You can use PowerPoint’s basic table formatting tools on it, but you can’t use any of Excel’s features after the conversion.
While that can be useful sometimes, your other two options—linking and embedding—are much more powerful, and are what we’re going to show you how to do in this article. Both are pretty similar, in that you end up inserting an actual Excel spreadsheet in your target presentation. It will look like an Excel sheet, and you can use Excel’s tools to manipulate it. The difference comes in how these two options treat their connection to that original Excel spreadsheet:
- If you link an Excel worksheet in a presentation, the target presentation and the original Excel sheet maintain a connection. If you update the Excel file, those updates get automatically reflected in the target presentation.
- If you embed an Excel worksheet in a presentation, that connection is broken. Updating the original Excel sheet does not automatically update the data in the target presentation.
There are advantages to both methods, of course. One advantage of linking a document (other than maintaining the connection) is that it keeps your PowerPoint presentation’s file size down, because the data is mostly still stored in the Excel sheet and only displayed in PowerPoint. One disadvantage is that the original spreadsheet file needs to stay in the same location. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to link it again. And since it relies on the link to the original spreadsheet, it’s not so useful if you need…
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