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MS Office 2010 - trouble syncing powerpoint to excel

Nightlytic

Nightlytic

Member
Hi,

I have MS office 2010, 32 bit, windows 7. I have a presentation file that has maybe c.20 charts that connect to two excel files located on a network, pulling charts and tables (these are excel-linked chart objects). I need to update this regularly.

It takes a minute or two to just update one chart/table (right click and update link) and some excel pop ups come up and need to be OK'd. If I try to update the entire slideshow, excel goes berserk it pops up message after message 'open as read only', 'file caused error on opening last time, do you want to continue' etc. it does it more times than there are files I think it actually re-opens the excel file over and over for different charts. Spend 1 hour letting it work and OK'ing messages last night and then at the end I had to kill it because now excel started saying the file I'm trying to open is already open, and the message kept popping back up no matter what I said to that.

Any idea how to diagnose this, make a working presentation that connects to excel? It might be the fact I'm connecting across network to fetch the files? idk...
 
I did this several times before, and I do recognize some of the frustration. :)
Also using MS office 2010, 32 bit, windows 7.
Do you see on your network drive "ghost" files? When network drives disconnect (server restart during the nightly hours?) you might see this. While the file actually is not open, this "ghost/temp" file sends the message I'm open. Normally you can delete it.
How heavy are the Excel files to which you connect? Perhaps you run into a memory issue when you refresh the full slide show.

For charts I applied this trick, that seemed to work: put them in the range of a singe cell (make the cell as wide and high to make the chart fit. Even on an extra sheet that contains a copy of all the charts from the workbook you need in the presentation.)
then copy this single cell and past that link in the PowerPoint.
The result is the same, but I noticed the updates happened a bit faster.
Looking forward to other replies if some-one knows the magical solution.
 
Hi G, Thank you for the response. I will look out for those ghost files. The files are heavy-ish, 4000-5000KB each (two files total). Thing is this is a work laptop and it is very badly built - it has a very powerful CPU but only 8gb ram, most of this is used by various programs I can't turn off (encryption, for instance) and so on performance my CPU is always chill at 10-20% usage but the laptop can sometimes churn forever because there is no free memory.

Some day I'll quit, find a job with proper equipment and be awesome there. For now I have to make do : (

I'll try the single cell trick, see if that works. Based on your experience, I think I might consider moving all charts all-together out of the files so that the one PP connects to is smaller. Only reason I haven't done that is because there are already a lot of files dependent on each other, I need to open them in sort of a ladder-pattern. Update data, now update calculations, now update the outputs... excel-to-excel connections are well optimised but the links sometimes break and you can really suffer the moment you shift the structure of any file or rename a file...
 
Yikes, dude! Bot oh so recognizable...
No guarantee on the tricks. I went with trial and error... And finally it somehow worked and didn't tough it anymore (and it is still working after 3 years, and the guy using it does not need to call me for help.)
 
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