Discover the "Paste Special" option to keep your statistical charts linked to their original data
PowerPoint and Excel can exchange data quite easily.
Furthermore, both can be used to create charts.
If you have to display a chart in a presentation, and you
already have created this file in Excel, there are several ways
to import it into PowerPoint: the first three I mention below
will allow you to import a chart from Excel into PowerPoint,
but there will not be any active link between the two files.
Your presentation will not update automatically reflecting the
changes you will eventually make in the future to the original
Excel file.
The fourth method is a bit more complicated, but will do what
the other two methods will not: you will not need to worry
about your PowerPoint presentation, since it will update
automatically any time you will modify the Excel file.
Let's see the three traditional methods:
1) By copying the Excel Spreadsheet:
a) You can open your Excel spreadsheet
b) Select and copy all the cells with the data you need
c) Open a PowerPoint presentation
d) Choose the chart layout
d) Paste the data into the PowerPoint datasheet
This way, PowerPoint will automatically create a new chart
that will reflect the data you have imported from Excel.
The disadvantage is that by default PowerPoint will create a
standard column 3-D chart using the default colors, so you may
need to modify and format it again to reflect the original
chart look and feel you had in Excel.
2) By importing the Chart into PowerPoint:
a) You can open PowerPoint and choose a chart slide layout
b) Double-click on the chart placeholder and obtain a standard
chart
c) Go to "Edit" >> "Import File..." and browse to
search your Excel file.
d) Select it and choose "Open".
By doing this, your standard PowerPoint chart will be
transformed into the one that contains the data imported from
Excel, but still, the appearance of this chart will be
different from the one you have in Excel for the reasons
explained above.
3) By copying the Chart and pasting it into PowerPoint:
a) You can open Excel and display the chart you want to export
to PowerPoint
b) Click on the chart to select it
c) Right-click on it and choose "Copy"
d) Open your presentation file
e) Paste your chart in a new slide or in an existing one
This chart will look exactly the same as the one in Excel.
To notice that, in this case, your Standard Toolbar in
PowerPoint will change, and will look like the one of Excel.
