The Excel-to-PowerPoint Connection

The easiest way to automatically update data in your slide decks

Josh Cottrell-Schloemer
3 min readMay 30, 2022
From the Excel Dashboard Toolkit and Excel+Design Free Newsletter

Tired of manually copy-pasting metrics from your Excel sheets into your PowerPoint slides? I know your pain.

I’ve had projects where I had to copy-paste 100+ metrics one-by-one into a new slide deck every single week. It. Was. A. Nightmare.

Luckily there is an easy solution.

You can link your Excel file to PowerPoint so that whenever you change your Excel calculations it automatically changes in your slides.
That’s right, you don’t have to do any more copy-pasting.

Here’s how you do it. Note: this will work for the PC version of Excel but not on mac.

How to put metrics and charts from your Excel sheet into PowerPoint

1 Open up your Excel sheet with your metrics, find the data or chart that you want in your PowerPoint file, select it and copy it.

2 In PowerPoint find the slide where you want to put your Excel data, navigate to the ‘Home’ tab, click the arrow beneath the ‘Paste’ section on the left and then hit ‘Paste Special’

3 In the box click ‘Paste link’ and then ‘As’ a Microsoft Worksheet Object.

4 Whenever you re-open the Excel doc you will get a dialogue box asking if you’d like to update the linked data and it will automatically update to match your Excel sheet.

If you like these tips and want to learn more about Excel then check out my newsletter and toolkit ↓

One of the templates I send out in my newsletter

1— I send out free sample templates every month in my newsletter: https://exceldashboardtemplate.com/newsletter

Some of the goodies included in my Excel toolkit — for sale here

2— I have a very detailed toolkit with 125 Excel designs (25 charts in 5 different color palettes) and more: https://exceldashboardtemplate.com/

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Josh Cottrell-Schloemer

Building data-focused products. Startups acquired=1. Hobby = making Google Data Studio & Excel beautiful.