To follow along with a video, please make sure you have downloaded the file working with charts.

Exercise file. The process for importing a chart from Excel with automatic updates is, 1.

select the chart and press control C 2.

Go into your PowerPoint presentation and select the slide.

You want to add it too. 3.

right click on the slide and under paste options, there are four options for pasting linked Excel charts.

Select the fourth option, keep source formatting and linked data.

4. The chart will then be inserted into the slide.

Using this method means that any changes to the underlying Excel spreadsheet can be carried over to this chart.

If you update the Excel spreadsheet whilst the PowerPoint presentation is open, the chart in PowerPoint will automatically update if the presentation is closed. When updates to the Excel spreadsheet are made, then simply select the chart, go to chart design in the ribbon, and then select refresh data and the chart will update.

Using this method also gives you greater flexibility in the chart.

If you right click on the chart and then select format chart area.

Under chart options are all the details in the chart, including the data points, access labels, chart, title, etc.

That can be adjusted in PowerPoint.

If you want to change the colours type of font or even font size, you can also resize the chart and PowerPoint will update the spacing.

The number of access labels will also reduce automatically if the chart size is reduced.

We're now going to go through the steps in order to import an Excel chart into your PowerPoint presentation with automatic updates.

So if you'd like to follow along with this video, make sure you've downloaded the exercise file working with charts, and once you've opened that, you should see something like this.

And here we've got the chart that we are going to copy into our PowerPoint presentation.

So first we're going to click on the chart and press control C to copy, we are going to go back into our PowerPoint presentation.

And here we're going to right click.

And now you'll see four paste options, for linking and embedding a chart.

So we are going to click on the fourth option, which is keep source formatting and link data.

And obviously link data means that any updates to the original source file will be carried through into the PowerPoint presentation.

And keep source formatting means that the formatting made in the Excel chart will be carried over like for like into this presentation.

So let's go ahead and click that. And there we go.

We've got the chart here.

And now we're just going to do a quick sense check to make sure that the linking is correct.

So we'll go back into the Excel and we will make a change to one of these bits of data.

We'll turn this to 3000. There we go. We've made a visible change to that and let's see if that's been carried through into the presentation.

And there you go. It has got some new data that's been carried through into this chart.

The other thing just to consider when importing a chart this way from Excel is you have a lot more variety in terms of formatting changes you can make. Obviously you can click on the different components and make changes, whether it's to changing the colour of bits and pieces, if you like updating the title, updating axes.

If you want to add different components, you can come over to the left hand side and change different bits and pieces if you want to.

And another thing you can do is right click on individual sections, format the axes, and perhaps you want to come down to this and you can change obviously all of these to have no decimal places.

And we'll go add, and then there you go. That's all been updated.