Pulling data from Excel/PPTs into master PPT

[chasehas]

Greetings. I have a presentation I give every week which requires information
from many other users. I used to have them submit the information in order
for me weekly to update the presentation, which was exceptionally
time-consuming. Recently, I have hosted the presentation on MS Sharepoint,
and allowed the users to make edits (generally format remains constant, only
numbers change) This is better, but still run into problems with multiple
users attempting to make changes at once, etc. Is there a way for PP to
import data from other PPT's/Excel sheets? If I can do that, I can create
several data files for each user, and then create a master presentation that
imports from those files. This neatly solves permissions issues as well.

I've tried to solve this before by creating multiple PPT's and having an
"index" slide that just contained hyperlinks, but then you start getting into
having to load multiple presentations.

Also, related question...is there an easy way to concatenate multiple PPT's
and/or Excel charts into one PPT? That might be easier (though less clean)
than the import method.

 

[pptkeys]

You could make your each persons charts link to an excel sheet you set up for
them. It may take time to set up, but theoretically, once you had each chart
in the prez link to a specific excel file for each person, so long as they
didn't change your sheet format, you could just replace their existing sheet
whenever they update.

 

[chasehas]

If each presentation ends by clicking an "End show" action button, you never
have more than two presentations, the index plus the current presentation, open
at once.

True, and it has worked well for me in the past. (assuming users don't
rename presentations). However, I prefer a straight-through style, and this
method doesn't permit that. Secondly, it doesn't really apply here anyway
because this presentation requires tabular data, not just slides, from
multiple users.

You can link Excel charts into your PPT file(s) and you can insert slides from
one PPT into another (Insert, Slides, From File in PPT 2003 and previous;
there's a similar command in 2007).

Unfortunately, Insert Slides only does one file at a time...again, not
applicable in this particular case, but I've had situations in the past where
I needed to pull together 20+ PPT's, and it gets very repetitive using that
method. (or copy-paste.)

 

[chasehas]

You could make your each persons charts link to an excel sheet you set up for
them. It may take time to set up, but theoretically, once you had each chart
in the prez link to a specific excel file for each person, so long as they
didn't change your sheet format, you could just replace their existing sheet
whenever they update.

Thanks- I'll explore this some more.