Have you ever struggled with copying data from Excel into PowerPoint? There are five different paste options in PowerPoint, and it can be confusing on which one to choose. Unfortunately, there's no perfect choice here, and it really depends on your process and project.
There's so many different options and factors to consider that we've actually created an entire course on this topic called Excel to PowerPoint Integrations. So in this video, I'm going to share one of the lessons from that course. course.
And this lesson is on embedding. So embedding charts or ranges from Excel into your PowerPoint presentations. And in the video, you're going to learn how to do this and also the pros and cons of this technique.
So you're going to learn when to use this technique and when not to use this technique because it can potentially expose sensitive data from your Excel files. So without further ado, here is lesson three from the Excel to PowerPoint integrations course. In this video, we're going to look at embedding Excel workbooks into PowerPoint.
So we're talking about the three different data options for pasting into PowerPoint. In the last video, we looked at this option, which is to link data. We're now going to look at how to embed Excel workbooks and the pros and cons of this technique. So let's jump right into an example. We'll go over to slide seven here.
We'll do some pasting. Then we'll jump back over to the Excel file and we'll go ahead and select our chart. We'll start with the chart.
We can right-click copy or control C. Then we'll go back to PowerPoint. And on the right-click menu here for the paste options, the first two are for embedding the workbook.
We have use destination theme and embed or keep source formatting and embed. And we're going to talk about the formatting part of it in the future. So for right now, we'll just use destination theme and embed the workbook.
And when we do this, we're actually making a copy of the Excel file as it was when we... copied or when we paste it, I should say, and making that copy and embedding the Excel file here into the PowerPoint presentation. So what that means is if we go back to Excel and change or update the data here of our chart or even filter it, we will not see any of those changes in PowerPoint. There's no link established here. Instead, and we can still update the data here, but instead we need to do that within PowerPoint.
So with the chart selected, we can go to the Chart Design tab here. You'll see that the Refresh Data button is disabled because there's no link. But on the Edit Data drop-down, there's two options to either edit the data.
This will open a small Excel window, kind of a minimalist Excel window. This is used if the user does not have Excel installed on their computer. Or we can choose to edit the data in Excel. This is my preferred option because the full Excel application opens here.
You can see this. I'll make it a little smaller so you can see it. So this is the full Excel application. You'll notice that the file name up here is chart in Microsoft PowerPoint.
There's no file name here because this file is actually embedded in the PowerPoint file. And the same general rules around the data apply here, same as linking the data. And what I mean by that is we can make changes or updates to the data, the source data of our chart, or even filter it down. Let's go ahead and apply a filter.
and these filters will be applied in PowerPoint. However, if we were to make formatting changes here to this chart in Excel, those will not be applied in PowerPoint. So we can go ahead, once you make the changes or updates to your data, and go ahead and close this down, and we'll just minimize the Excel window, and now you can see those data changes and that filter have been reflected here in PowerPoint. But again, if you wanted to change the formatting of this chart, you do that in PowerPoint. PowerPoint.
So you can still add the elements here. You get all the same options that you have in Excel to add or remove elements. You can also go to the chart design tab here and change the formatting of the chart and do any of those changes here in PowerPoint. So that's embedding the chart.
Now let's look at embedding a range. So I'll just go ahead and move this chart over here. We'll do this on the same slide.
We'll go back over to Excel. and let's go ahead and copy this pivot table range here i'll use ctrl c this time to copy we'll jump back over to powerpoint and if we look at our right click paste options here the middle option is embed so go ahead and click that and that paste in what looks like and what is a picture you can still resize this and to make this picture bigger or you can make it smaller but this is a picture but it has also embedded the excel workbook here with the paste Now to update this Excel workbook is a little bit different than with charts. In this case, you can actually just double left click this or you can right click worksheet object. Edit and that's going to edit or I'm sorry that's going to open this Excel window within the slide So you'll notice up here that we have the Excel application the ribbon up here within PowerPoint It is not open to separate window. This is still within PowerPoint We're seeing Excel here and then our window has also changed into an Excel window We can actually navigate the sheet tabs down here if we make this a bit bigger and we can also resize the range that we're currently seeing.
So I can make this bigger and it snaps to the rows and columns. You can start to see our chart come into view here. And then when we click off of this, just click anywhere off of this, that re-renders the image and displays it here in the PowerPoint slide. So if your range gets bigger or smaller, you can change the size of that. You can also again, if we double click this, Like I said before, you can actually go even to a different sheet here and display that, and then you could change the size of whatever you want to display, click off of this, and then you will see that information here displayed in a picture.
So let's talk about some of the pros and cons of embedding the workbook. On slide 8 here, I've listed these out. For the pros, the advantages here is that the Excel file travels with the PowerPoint file.
So this can make it easier for others to update and edit. especially if your process includes last-minute changes, which a lot of PowerPoint presentations do. We're making a last-minute change right before the meeting.
Don't really want to worry about updating links back to our source, or we might not be on the same computer as our source file. Might want to have someone else making changes. In that case, the Excel file is traveling with the PowerPoint file. It's embedded in it, so it's easy to make those updates last minute.
However, there are some disadvantages and some important ones. First of all, and to me the biggest one, is we've now created multiple versions of our Excel file. So this can mean that we need to update it in multiple places.
We might need to still update this Excel file back here that the original data came from, and we need to do that, but we'd also then need to go back to the PowerPoint and update it as well. So this can really cause a lot of file version issues that you have to then worry about, organize, and consider. and it can make things more difficult.
The other thing is that the embedded Excel file can include sensitive data. So for example, let's say we had some headcount data here in our Excel file, and maybe this chart just shows some average salaries by department or something like that, and we want to show the chart in the slide. If we embed this Excel file into our PowerPoint, We're sending all that data that's in the Excel file around with it.
So if we're emailing this file around or sharing the PowerPoint, anyone that has the file will be able to access any data that's inside of it. So that's really important, especially if you're working with sensitive data, is to take that into consideration when you're embedding a PowerPoint. I almost wish that PowerPoint had a warning message come up. to tell you that when you're embedding a workbook and you choose that paste option and you could potentially be exposing sensitive information so again just another good thing to consider another potential drawback is that it can increase file size and that's typically not a problem these days with file size and storage however if you have a lot of big images in your powerpoint presentation then your file size can get quite large which can slow down opening the file sharing it with others and you can run into limitations like that. So again, just good to kind of know those pros and cons with embedding the workbook.
And I should also mention that I will have a separate video that will explain choosing the right solution of all of these paste options based on some of these scenarios we're talking about here. All right, so that was lesson three from the Excel to PowerPoint integrations course. Throughout the course, we look at all the other paste options and the pros and cons of each of those. keyboard shortcuts, linking data from SharePoint and OneDrive, embedding charts with slicers, and a lot more. And this course is part of our Elevate Excel training program.
That's our comprehensive beginner to advanced program that covers everything from basic formulas all the way up to Power Query, Power Pivot, Power BI, and even macros in VBA. So if you're interested in elevating your Excel skills with all of our awesome courses, I'll put a link in the description below where you can check those out. Of course, if you have any questions about this video, feel free to leave a comment below.
Thanks again for watching. Have a great day and I'll see you in the next video.