Inserting Excel Table into PowerPoint and auto update

[minendo]

Currently, I maintain an Excel database that I update daily which results in new calculations and values being displayed each time I enter in the raw data. All new values are displayed in a table on Sheet 1 and I want to display the table in a PowerPoint presentation that we have constantly running and being displayed in our employee area.

I know I can just copy and paste the table into PPT, but I would like to insert the table somehow so that it will automatically update and I don't have to update the PPT file each time.

Is there any way to do this? Both programs are 2002 version.

 

[mayest]

Hmmm, this is an interesting question. I just did an experiment using Office 2007 since I no longer have access to 2002. If you copy from Excel and then do a Paste as Link into PowerPoint, any changes to the spreadsheet are immediately reflected in PowerPoint. Of course, this requires both programs to be open. If the Excel file is closed, though, the link cannot be updated as far as I can tell ( I added the directory containing the Excel file as a Trusted Location). I had thought that PowerPoint would read from a closed file when you told it to update the link. Apparently not.

I think that your solution will have to involve VBA. I would think that it would need to be run on a schedule (using Application.OnTime), and would need to check to see if Excel is open. If not, then it would need to be launched with the file in question loaded. I think that you can do this without Excel being visible, so it wouldn't have to interrupt your constantly running presentation. After the update, you can close Excel again if it wasn't open, or just close the file if it was.

There may be file sharing problems if somebody is already editing the Excel file, so you'll need to work that out. The solution may be as simple as an Excel sub that automatically saves a copy to a shared network folder where PowerPoint reads it. It may not be really easy to do this, but it shouldn't be too difficult for somebody that is familiar with both Excel and PowerPoint VBA.

Of course, there is probably a simpler solution available, so hopefully somebody knows.