How to add your Excel chart to PowerPoint and add animation

A question that comes up in class is how to get your chart from Excel into PowerPoint. Let’s do this.

1. Begin by creating your chart in Excel.
2. Highlight all the data (you can use Ctrl and Shift and 8 to do this)
3. Click on Insert | Recommended Charts . In this scenario I chose a line chart because I wanted to show changes over time
4. Click on Ctrl and C (or your preferred way to copy)
5. Navigate over to the PowerPoint presentation and then choose Paste.

You basically have 5 Paste options.

• Use Destination Theme and Embed the Workbook (this means the chart takes on the “colouring” of the PowerPoint presentation) changes to the Excel file do not flow through to the chart
• Keep Source Formatting and Embed the Workbook (this means the chart retains the colouring it has in the original Excel file and changes to the Excel file do not flow through to the chart)
• Use Destination Theme and Link the data (this means the chart takes on the “colouring” of the PowerPoint presentation) changes to the Excel file do flow through to the chart
• Keep Source Formatting and Link the Data (this means the chart retains the colouring it has in the original Excel file and changes to the Excel file do flow through to the chart)
• Picture – this means that you paste the chart as a picture but you can’t animate it and it has no connection to the original data.

You can read more about the differences between the embedding and linking here but the basic differences are:

• Linking=when source data is updated, PowerPoint file is updated
• Embedding= static copy of data – doesn’t change when original data updated.

Difference between linking and embedding

Adding animations

Then when you have created your chart in PowerPoint the next step is to add animation to it.

1. Click on the chart
2. Choose Animations
3. Then choose the type of animations you want e.g. Fly in . This will control the way the chart will appear on the slide.
4. If you want to exercise further control over this use the Effect Options.