I have to edit an existing PowerPoint presentation my boss put together. It contains, what appears to simply be, a snippet of a spreadsheet. So, I figured the cells were simply copied from Excel Spreadsheet and into PowerPoint.
But, on the PowerPoint slide, I double-clicked on the spreadsheet to look at it in an “Edit” mode, let’s say. The whole entire spreadsheet appears - almost as if I were in Excel itself - complete with side slide bars to move about the document.
Ideally, I need to quickly learn how to:
a) How did my boss do this? (I can’t the “Paste Special” feature to appear when I follow the “help” instructions.
b) Once pasted into my PowerPoint slide, how do I size the spreadsheet to show the correct number of rows I wish to show? At first, it seemed as if he selected the rows (and columns) by highlighting them with the mouse while in this “edit” mode. But, when I tried, I get all sorts of odd things happening.
PowerPulling my hair out off my PowerPointed head! All advice greatly appreciated! - Jinx
You select the range from with XL. Launch XL, drag-select the range, Edit | Copy, then go to PPT and Edit | Paste Special | XL object. That will paste in just the range. If Paste Special doesn’t appear, you have Quit XL - you need to leave XL open while copying and pasting. (Or if you don’t see Paste Special at all, dbl-click the Edit menu to get all the items on that menu).
If you highlight the range like I described above, you shouldn’t have to resize it. If it so happens that you have the entire spreadsheet object in PPT, you can right-click the object from PPT and choose Show Picture Toolbar, then use the Crop button to get just the range you want.
One more thing - if you Paste | Special | Paste Link, you won’t have to update PPT every time - it will automatically pull in the new data from XL. Just goto Edit | Links… and choose Update Now.
If all else fails you can always use ALT + Print Screen and take a “picture” of it, then go to Paint and crop it. Then you can paste it as an image when you are satisfied.
Within PowerPoint (PPT), under the “Insert” pull-down menu, select “Object…” A dialog box comes up with two radio buttons, IIRC, etc. The bottom of the two radio buttons allows you to pull in a file name, and the once-gray “Browse” click-button becomes active (ungrayed). From there, I just located the file I wanted.
However, I assume the Inserted Object file (in PPT) is not linked in any fashion to the source file (in Excel), I WAG? In other words, an update to the actual Excel Spreadsheet does not seem to automatically update the Object inserted into the PPT slide. (Is there a way to do this?) For now, I will just re-insert a new object each time the source Excel file is updated.
In the Insert | Object | Create from File dialog there’s a button “Link” next to the Browse button. If you enable that, it will Link it such that you don’t have to reinsert it each time.
