For example, let’s say I need 1Q, 2Q, 3Q and 4Q sales figures on a bar chart for each of 50 states.
What is the fastest, easiest way to make all of those charts?
If I have all those numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, is there a way to populate the 50 Powerpoint slides automatically?
These charts will eventually have to go to other people to include in other presentations, so anything that depends too heavily on linking, without being able to unlink, wouldn’t quite do it.
Anyone out there have experience doing this kind of thing?
I’d say make it in Excel and then just cut/paste the area into Powerpoint. You could also do a screenshot from any program if you didn’t want the others to edit it (do alt-print screen and paste this into Paint) and crop the picture and cut/paste it into Powerpoint.
Is making the charts in Excel really going to be the best way to go when we are talking a large number of charts? I know how to make the charts, but I’m looking to automate for speed. Anyone have more alternatives?
IF you’re a programmer, it’s not difficult to automate Excel to spit out all 200 charts (50 states * 4 quarters) as separate GIF files. Once the code is written, they might only take a second or two apiece to create.
It’s also not difficult to automate Powerpoint to buld a slide according to a template you create and insert a GIF-chart into the slide. And doing it 200 times is not much harder than doing it once. And it’d only take a second or two per slide, and you can go get coffee while it chugs along for a couple minutes.
But trying to explain how to do all this over a messageboard to someone who’s just a user of Excel/Powerpoint is all but impossible. The tool you need to learn to use is called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).
I suspect there’s a VBA for Dummies book. Get that, or something similar, and you can probably learn how to make a lot of your repetitive tasks a LOT easier. It takes some imagination to learn this stuff, but your motivation should be strong: boring stuff that used to take all day, over and over and over … can be done with a few clicks.