Join David Rivers for an in-depth discussion in this video Pasting a table from Excel, part of PowerPoint for Mac 2011 Essential Training.
On occasion, you may find that when you want to add content to a table on a slide in a presentation, that content already exists somewhere else, such as a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, for example. Well, in those cases, you can actually go into Excel and copy that info over to your slide in PowerPoint, and there are number of different formats to choose from. So let's check it out, using our TwoTreesTale presentation. You should be on slide 13, because we are going to insert a new slide to display our sales results. To do that, we'll go up to the New Slide dropdown button, and all we really need is a title.
We'll take the Title, and then down below we'll have an empty space for the content we are about to copy. So we'll choose Title Only, and where it says Click to add title, we'll just click there, and type in 'Sales Results,' And now we can just click on the slide, anywhere on the slide, to deselect that textbox. We are ready to copy the content over. So we'll go over to Microsoft Excel. If you have got the exercise files, we are going to work with our Quarterly Sales Results spreadsheet here. And the first step is to select the content we want to bring over to our slide; in this case, it's all of the content we see on the sheet.
So I'll just click and drag across and down, from cell A1 to F5. We have now got our range. It's highlighted. We just need to copy it. So we'll go up to the Edit menu and select Copy, or Command+C on your keyboard. Now it's time to go back to PowerPoint, and we are at our slide. We are ready to paste. When we go up to the Edit menu, you may already know the keyboard shortcut is Command+V. That's going to paste our content in the default format, which is a Microsoft Excel Object, meaning you'll be able to edit that content in Microsoft Excel.
If you want to see a list of the other formats, select Paste Special. So there is the default right at the top, Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object, meaning you'll be able to double- click the object and use Excel to make changes to the content. Sometimes though, you don't want to be able to change to the content; maybe it's better to paste it as a picture. So an image has taken of that content, and then the end result is you are working with the picture on your slide, as opposed to the actual data. The same thing goes for a Portable Document Format, or PDF.
You could also choose just to bring it in as text, Rich Text Format, or Unformatted Text. So if you choose Formatted Text, any formatting applied in Excel will also be applied to it here in PowerPoint; Unformatted Text, you'll get just plain old text, and you can do the formatting yourself. So let's try the default, which is Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object, and click OK. So there it is. It kind of looks like a table in PowerPoint, but really it's an object. It's an Excel object. We can go to the corners and stretch it out if we want to make it a little bit bigger.
We can manipulate it that way. But if you click inside, you'll notice you don't actually click in the cells, and you can't make changes to the borders, and so on. If you want it wider or more narrow columns, you can't do any of that. If you want to make changes to this content, you have to double-click, and that's going to flip you back to Microsoft Excel, where you have access to the content. Any changes you make here will be shown on your slide in PowerPoint. Let's flip back over to PowerPoint without making any changes, and take a look at the end result here.
Maybe we should just drag that down towards the center of our slide and deselect to see the end result. It looks pretty good. So you have got all of the content from Excel into our PowerPoint presentation, and the format we use allows us to go into Excel and make changes to that content if we need to. Let's select it one more time. You'll notice what happens up here next to the Home tab: a Format tab appears. We can click that, if we want to spice it up a little bit now. Notice, for example, we have Shape Styles. Now these are all dimmed out, so we can't make changes to the style, because it's not really a shape, but we can make changes to the fill and Line style.
Let's go to the Line dropdown, and if we want to choose a nice dark green, for example, and then go back to the Line dropdown and go down to Weights, and make a little bit thicker, like 41/2 points, now deselect to see the end result: you've got that nice border around the outside. So that's one of the formatting changes we can make to this object. Click it again to select it, and click Format if you have to, to see the formatting options. There is also Effects that appear to be available, until we click the button.
Notice that these are effects that might be applied to shapes, for example, or pictures. They are not available here when working with an Excel object. So that's one of the drawbacks to choosing the Excel Object Format. If we were to choose Picture, you'd be able to make changes to the shape styles, the effects and so on. The same thing goes for fills and lines, if they are using text effects in there. So we'll just deselect by clicking anywhere off to the edge of the slide, and there is our end result. So keep in mind, if you don't want to have to create a table from scratch and retype all of this data into that table, go into Excel, if it's already there, copy it, paste it; you'll save yourself a lot of time.
- Exploring the Presentation Gallery
- Adding, removing, and arranging slides
- Working with slide layouts and slide masters
- Using and creating templates
- Adding and formatting text
- Working with tables and charts
- Inserting images
- Adding video and sound to a presentation
- Animating slide transitions and slide objects
- Showing and sharing presentations