Excel to PowerPoint - What's the best way to do it? (Embedding, Linking or Other)

this is taylor from nuts of bolt speed training with a great question i received about moving from excel to powerpoint lindsey wrote i love the videos it's probably the best resource i found for understanding the nuances of powerpoint so let's get into the nuances of lindsay's question down here below which is in transferring from excel to powerpoint what is the best way to do it should we link our spreadsheet should we paste them as pictures and i also want to look into the second part of her question which is how do you create pre-formatted charts and tables in the slide master we're actually not going to do this on the slide master we're going to do this in the normal view but the goal is going to be the same to have our charts have the same aesthetic look and feel in every presentation so i'm going to dive into all of this in this video with the goal to help get you to happy hour but first if you want to support the channel and learn everything there is to know about powerpoint check out our powerpoint pro membership in the description box below so let's get into what the four different ways to move from excel to powerpoint you can paste as a picture you can embed your excel file inside of powerpoint you can link excel to powerpoint or what i recommend and i'll show you some tricks for doing this at the end of this video you can build these tables and charts natively in powerpoint that said i do want to get into these individual other ways because either you're bound to do it your colleagues better do it your clients bound to do it so i want to look at what goes wrong when you look at pacing as pictures embedding and linking in powerpoint and let's start by pasting excel as a picture and why i don't recommend it first off you have a couple of options if you're going to paste as a picture which are just good to know in general you can use your screen clipping shortcut windows shift s or you can use your paste special shortcut and i'm also going to use uh numerous times throughout this video the alt tab switch application shortcut which i recommend everybody should know so if i come in here to powerpoint let's go look at our excel file and we have this apple revenue 2005 to 2019. now if we're going to do a screen clipping that's just windows shift s your screen is going to gray out you're going to get a little cursor you just click and drag to take a screen clipping of anything on your screen ctrl v to paste we'll paste in that as a picture now i'd recommend instead i'm going to do this for this table first i'm going to ctrl c to copy i'm going to alt tab back to powerpoint and i'm going to control alt v for paste special you can also find this option in the home tab the paste drop down there's the paste special if i hover to discover you can see control alt v so ctrl alt v for a table will give me the enhanced meta file format which is newer than the windows meta file format so i recommend using this picture format click ok and i get a picture of my excel table here in powerpoint if i alt tab back i can do the same thing with my chart ctrl c to copy alt tab back to powerpoint ctrl v to paste special this time because it's a chart i get the png jpeg gif i'm just going to choose png because it's higher quality high resolution and you can see a picture of my powerpoint chart now here in powerpoint now that's how to do it but there's five problems when pasting as a picture number one a spreadsheet an excel spreadsheet does not make a great presentation just because it's a spreadsheet for example if this was your goal was simply to show revenue growth from 2005 to 2019 instead of having the table you'd want to put a percent caker in or make a graphic showing these two numbers or some kind of trend line moving so a good spreadsheet does not make a great presentation you're going to want to watch out for filters the filters that can be up here kind of look ugly in powerpoint grid lines other excel formatting all right the formatting in excel this is calibri is not matching currently matching my powerpoint spreadsheet so this is something you'll need to look out for if you're going to do this you also need to look out for cell borders if you can tell here in on youtube these borders are actually thicker than the borders up top so picture borders in table cells like this appear thicker which makes your presentations look less professional another key point is you cannot update your table or chart is a picture here so someone has to recreate this convert your picture back into text back into a table which is possible but it's not super easy to do right off the bat and the biggest thing to be aware of when you're pasting these pictures here into powerpoint is they're super easy to warp so someone can very easily warp not knowing what they're doing your picture if this happens to you you can picture format tab picture resize drop down reset picture and size will reformat the picture to the size it was originally placed in your presentation if you're going to resize a picture in powerpoint hold the shift key to keep the aspect ratio so that's just a couple reasons why or problems with pasting as a picture into powerpoint now if you're going to do it anyway which you might be bound to do so if you're going to go excel use the paste special and then come in here to powerpoint i have some things to keep in mind i'd recommend setting up a blank part of your model with the correct formatting so the correct font sizes the correct size of the font i would take away your gridlines make a very clean snapshot of your model or your your your spreadsheet that you want to bring into powerpoint that'll help out with the professionals maybe your presentation i recommend consolidating your main points again if you have a table of numbers and you really are just trying to highlight these last two don't paste in all of the other numbers that aren't relevant to your presentation so really try to consolidate your main points that you want to present you're always going to need to send your spreadsheet to anyone who needs to update or edit the data within the pictures because you cannot natively edit pictures in powerpoint you have to reconvert your pictures back in the text or reconvert your broken link charts which we'll get to in a little bit back into text and just be aware that you are taking a shortcut if you're pasting a picture into powerpoint you are losing usability you're losing functionality and you're losing on design so make sure that taking this shortcut is worth it to you for your presentations so that's pasting the picture now let's look at your next option you have which is essentially taking excel and just embedding it embedding it right into powerpoint which gives you some pros but to me again this is mostly cons but let's just look at how to do this and the first thing to be aware of is to do this properly you have to have this show paste options button when content is pasted selected mine by default keeps turning itself off so you need to know how to turn this back on if this happens to you so here's exactly how you do it i'll come back here into powerpoint you need to come to the file tab you come to options down below and here in the powerpoint options you simply come and find advanced and here in the cut copy and paste you want to make sure you have a check mark next to show paste options button when content is pasted you'll see exactly how this works they show you how to embed stuff here in powerpoint so what we're going to do we're just going to simply copy and paste our excel data we're going to use what we just opened up which is that control paste options effect to either embed tables or you have some other options with your charts so i'm going to alt tab back to excel let's start with the table i'll ctrl c to copy alt tab ctrl v to paste these are the paste options we just turned on i can either click it with my mouse or just hit the ctrl key on my keyboard here you have this is destination styles this is keeping the styles from our pre our excel spreadsheet here's the embed option if i select embed that excel file is now embedded here in powerpoint if i double click it you can see i now have an excel file of my spreadsheet here in powerpoint and i'll talk about some of the downfalls of doing this in just a second let's alt tab back to excel let's try this with a chart so i'll control c to copy alt tab i'm going to control v to paste hit control from my paste options here you have the first two are your embed options so use the destination theme so use my powerpoint formatting or keep my excel formatting you're most likely going to keep your powerpoint formatting so it matches a little bit better and there you can see if i right click edit data i'm going to open up that spreadsheet it looks like excel but notice it says chart in microsoft powerpoint so this is again an embedded sheet inside of powerpoint it's not the excel spreadsheet um that we're using just a second ago now a couple of things to be aware of your entire spreadsheet is now inside of powerpoint including and this is the big catch any hidden sheets so for example if i double click this is an embedded powerpoint file if i double click if i right click the the sheets down below and select unhide i left a confidential sheet in this presentation so if you send this presentation to someone with this embedded excel file and you didn't scrub out your confidential information someone can get all of that confidence confidential information directly here in powerpoint the next thing is the zoom out zoom out formatting as you scroll the way this works as i scroll down you'll see that the picture or what's shown here in powerpoint changes if i double click if i scroll to the top so this kind of like zoom in zoom out formatting can sometimes be difficult to work with as you're trying to figure out what you're going to actually show or not show here in powerpoint another downfall of this is you can't link different parts of an embedded spreadsheet to different parts of your slide so if i wanted to right you would think that because i now have this excel spreadsheet here in powerpoint if i wanted to copy this bit of data control c to copy click into powerpoint and control v to paste right even if i embed right this now creates two embedded uh tables here in powerpoint and they're all obviously easy to warp again so this is now one embedded document this is now two embedded documents of the same document here in the same powerpoint file and i also want to make the point that there is no correlation to your original excel data so once you've embedded one of these files this is 100 a different spreadsheet or a different financial model than the one that's sitting on your desktop so you don't want to make the mistake of if this was the one on my desktop of trying to update this one and expecting this one in your powerpoint presentation to update that is a different type of embedding and we're going to get to linking in just a second like right now so linking excel to powerpoint so the goal here is really great you are trying to set up a situation whereas as you update your data in excel it gets pushed or the the differences get pushed to powerpoint so this seems like the holy grail of excel to powerpoint but there are some things to be aware of so first off this is very similar to what we just did with embedding if i come into powerpoint i'm going to alt tab back to excel if i control let's just do this with the chart i'm going to control c to copy the chart alt tab back to powerpoint i'm going to ctrl v to paste i'm going to open up the paste special options and notice here's the linking so the first two are embedding options this is linking so linking use destination theme or linking using the source formatting typically again you're always going to want to use the formatting that's here in your powerpoint presentation and the goal the holy grail i'll just hold shift and kind of make this bigger the goal here and why this is a great option or seems like a great option is if i now go back to excel and i change this the 2019 number let's just do this alt tab let's just change this to 360 billion which is not true but i hit enter my chart here in excel changes i alt tab back to powerpoint and the chart here also changes so this is great linking all right when it works but it's very easy to break a link if you rename your file in any way including version two that will break the link in your presentation if you move your file to a new location on your computer that will break the link which includes sending your file to a colleague all right they must re-establish the link on their machine if they also want to be able to update and use that information so to me this really creates this tug of war when sharing your documents and getting this the linked file is not available is super annoying if you're working on your presentation at 11 o'clock at night and you're trying to finish it before tomorrow morning so this is why i personally really don't like linked files i get these all the time and i oftentimes will just recreate the chart now if you do get let me just give you a demonstration of this if you do get a broken link and someone sends you the file so if i right click edit data so this linked file is no longer linked you can alright from the file tab info edit linked files you can change the source so i'm going to file info i'm going to scroll down right below related documents you have edit linked to files i'm going to click on that i'm going to click change source so this is my original one my broken link i changed it to broken link version two i know i did it on purpose i'm gonna come to my desktop there's apple annual revenue broken link version two if i click that click open click close all right that linked file let's see if this works should now open right back up so this is linked data to the spreadsheet this is now good to go i can update and edit the links and now the spreadsheet will update but as soon as i then send it back to my colleague all right going back to this tug-of-war effect they're going to have to do that same thing again this is why oftentimes when people either embed or link stuff into powerpoint and want me to work on their slides or do something with their slides i oftentimes recreate it natively in powerpoint which gives you so much more power and it's so much easier than you think so this is now getting to the second part of lindsay's question so how do we create pre-formatted charts and templates on the slide master again we're not going to do this on the slide master with the goal of making everything look amazing so let's start with building and formatting your tables natively in powerpoint which is easier than you think the tables can be a total pain because they operate differently but the key here is to use the tools that powerpoint provides you if you think of this as a workbench most people completely ignore all of the default table tools that powerpoint's already built for you which ensures that you're going to spin your wheels and waste your time so let's just look at four of my favorite powerpoint table tricks the first is you really want to use whatever is in the table design and the table layout tab so if this is a powerpoint table if i come to the table design notice you have header row options for header row formatting i can ban my rows automatically which is much faster than manually trying to do this yourself you have a total row option just thing to be aware of here this total row option is formatting only this is not a calculated sum so the go the first thing is to really just use these formatting options that powerpoint gives you and they give you a whole bunch of different colors based on your theme the one i usually use just this gray one so that's the first step oh and your layout tab you have the options to you know resize your rows manually you resize your columns well now i've really messed it up let me just click them forward resize your columns you can distribute your columns there's a bunch of tools up here to automatically get your table to work instead of trying to manually do this yourself the next thing to watch is your interior margins especially if you're pasting data in from excel so if i right click and i come to format shape you want to come to the text box option size and properties text box open those up so your margins will typically if you're pacing from excel will come in without any left margins right margins or maybe they'll come in with too tall of top margins so you really want to use your margins to kind of resize your table to the size that fits your presentation best another big one when moving from excel to powerpoint is looking out for hidden spacing and by hidden spacing that comes in with the accounting style formatting and i actually have some in this one notice if i double click look at all this extra space that shows up inside my table this is powerpoint trying to match my formatting which was it which was the accounting style which if i just come down here to the last one the effect you're going for is to create that full level underline so the accounting style format in excel let's just assume that this was i've made my table too small to grab now trying to get that trying to get that last row bold let's just use the total row you're trying to get that underline that doesn't look good with the line and the underline but you get the effect so you're trying to get that underline this is spaces that you'll want to delete out of your table because as you start to collapse your table here in powerpoint your columns are going to stack up as you can see all that extra spacing so i'm going to controls you to undo that so watch out for hidden spacing and once you finally have a table design that you like for example this one what you can do to set it default is here in the table design window styles window you can right click and select set as default now this is not going to set as default all of the formatting adjustments you made to your table what it's going to apply is all of your headers totals banded rows so that if i now go insert a table here in my presentation you can see that it's going to come in with whatever defaults i set so this is the closest you can get to setting a default table style and then every table after the fact so after you've set this as the default style every table after the effect will have all of that formatting now there's a lot more to get into with powerpoint tables so i do plan on doing a powerpoint deep dive if you want me to make that video first please let me know in the comments and i will put it here on youtube as soon as i have it because i have gotten a lot of other table questions but those are my first four big table tips now as when it comes to building and formatting your charts natively in powerpoint this is way easier than you think and probably the best charting trick that most people don't know about and the thing here is if you take this default chart in powerpoint and you format it to look like this you know if you know all of the tips and tricks and shortcuts it could take you 30 seconds which is super fast but once you've formatted a chart it should take you about three seconds to reapply that formatting to any other chart in your presentation so this is getting to making your charts look consistent because it'll be your font styles your data labels your sizes your axes your widths your shape fills your legends your series names the whole of the whole nine yards and the goal here is you really want to let powerpoint do your garbage task for you if this is powerpoint to you think of powerpoint as collecting sorting and pushing all of these different tasks around and manually formatting your charts which a lot of people still do is one of the biggest garbage tasks you can do in powerpoint because it takes a ton of time you have to double check it and powerpoint can automatically do it for you so this is what's called a chart template and it's a two-step process so let's just walk through this here is a chart let's say this is formatted exactly the way i want it maybe i want these to be bold maybe i don't maybe i want to well just let's just say this is the way i want my chart what you're going to do is you're going to right click your chart you're going to click save as template save as template i've already saved one i'm going to call this one my single series dark blue total so you're going to type and i recommend being as descriptive as possible because you start to save a bunch of chart templates it's hard to find them if you don't um name them properly you're going to click save so right click your chart save as chart template add a descriptive name and click ok once you've done that and this chart had about 16 or 17 formatting adjustments to it if you come to another chart in your deck this is a default chart here in powerpoint you can apply all of these chart formatting adjustments in just about three seconds by right clicking your chart change chart type notice you have this templates bucket up here click the templates bucket i did the dark blue total i select it i click ok and powerpoint automatically applies all of that chart formatting here to my chart including my axis widths my shape fills my border outlines my data labels my data label formatting it even brings over this kind of dark blue total row for my chart so that is for chart templates is probably the best charting trick that most people don't know about in powerpoint and it also carries over to word and excel as well so if you save a chart template here in powerpoint word or excel you can apply those templates to your other ones and i'll do a deep dive on charts and chart templates a little bit later that i'll also stick up here on youtube so those are my responses to what is the best way to move from excel to powerpoint embedding linking or other now i'm curious to know what you think let me know in the comments section below what your favorite way to move from excel to powerpoint is and again if you want to help support the channel and learn everything there is to know about powerpoint check out our powerpoint pro membership in the description box below this is taylor from nutso bolt speed training see you at happy hour you

Channel: Nuts & Bolts Speed Training

Views: 42,572

Rating: 4.8416667 out of 5

Keywords: Excel to PowerPoint, how to insert excel into powerpoint, link excel to powerpoint, how to embed excel into powerpoint, Microsoft PowerPoint

Id: MRhWNttrXxU

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020