How to Link or Embed an Excel Worksheet in Microsoft PowerPoint So, with all that in mind, let’s take a look at how to link and embed an Excel Sheet in Microsoft PowerPoint. There are some distinct advantages to embedding, though. For example, if you’re distributing that presentation to people who might not have access to the original Excel sheet, or if the presentation needs to show that Excel sheet at a specific point in time (rather than getting updated), embedding (and breaking the connection to the original sheet) makes more sense. And since it relies on the link to the original spreadsheet, it’s not so useful if you need to distribute the presentation to people who don’t have access to that location.Įmbedding that data, on the other hand, increases the size of presentation, because all that Excel data is actually embedded into the PowerPoint file. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to link it again. One disadvantage is that the original spreadsheet file needs to stay in the same location. There are advantages to both methods, of course. One advantage of linking a document (other than maintaining the connection) is that it keeps your PowerPoint presentation’s file size down, because the data is mostly still stored in the Excel sheet and only displayed in PowerPoint. Updating the original Excel sheet does not automatically update the data in the target presentation.

If you embed an Excel worksheet in a presentation, that connection is broken.

If you update the Excel file, those updates get automatically reflected in the target presentation.

If you link an Excel worksheet in a presentation, the target presentation and the original Excel sheet maintain a connection.

The difference comes in how these two options treat their connection to that original Excel spreadsheet:

It will look like an Excel sheet, and you can use Excel’s tools to manipulate it. Both are pretty similar, in that you end up inserting an actual Excel spreadsheet in your target presentation.

While that can be useful sometimes, your other two options-linking and embedding-are much more powerful, and are what we’re going to show you how to do in this article. You can use PowerPoint’s basic table formatting tools on it, but you can’t use any of Excel’s features after the conversion. This works okay, but all it really does is convert the data to a simple table in PowerPoint. The first is by simply copying that data from the spreadsheet, and then pasting it into the target document. You actually have three options for including a spreadsheet in a PowerPoint presentation. What’s the Difference Between Linking and Embedding?

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