#  Other Applications & Softwares  > PowerPoint Formatting & General >  >  Dynamic linking, formating and variable references

## The Phil

Hi,

I have three questions about linking to Excel data in Power Point 2013.

1. Is there a way to have a text field that has text as well as dynamic data?  What I'm doing is making a slide with the sentence "This project has another $900 in expenses in 2017."  I would like the "900" to be dynamic.  I already did that by making text that says "This project has another [blank space here] in expenses in 2017."  Then I made a link to the cell with the "900" and put it over top of that text box in the right place.  That works, but it's not very pretty, if the value changes to 1,000 then the spacing looks funny.  Is there a different way to do this?

2. One of my slides has a linked Excel value, and in the Excel sheet that cell is a total so it has border formatting on the top and bottom.  Is there a way to keep it as a linked cell, but not carry over the formatting?  I don't want those lines to show up in Power Point.  In Power Point, the border formatting is already set to have no lines.

3. My Power Point slide has a link to Cell E10 on Sheet3, and updates dynamically as it should.  The problem is, if I insert a row into sheet 3, then the value I need moves down to cell E11, but Power Point still looks at E10.  Is there a way to link Power Point to a value dynamically?  ie, could it do something like VLOOKUP("Total",Sheet3!A:E,5,0)

Thanks so much, I've spent a few hours googling this to get as far as I've come, but I just can't get past these 3 things.

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## kev_

There are some battles that you cannot win and this is one of them  :Smilie: 
- a linked cell is a "photo" 
- Excel took that photo
- the photo is dynamic in Excel
- PowerPoint has a hot link to a live feed of that photo
- Powerpoint can squeeze and stretch how it displays the photo
- PowerPoint can put borders around it and fill it with colour and make it transparent
- PowerPoint cannot change what is in the photo
PowerPoint's name may contain the word "power" but it is Excel that wins this particular power struggle  :Wink: 

When linking try to keep everything simple at the Excel end

Suggestions

1 Create a separate worksheet for your PowerPoint requirements (sheet PP)
2 Pull data into that from other sheets by formula
3 Format cells in PP in the way you want them to appear in PowerPoint (deals with Q2)
4 To address  Q1, build your sentence using concatenation. Get *this project has $500 expenses in 2017* from:
- B3 contains *this project has $*
- C3 contains *500* but is pulled in by formula from another sheet and therefore dynamic
- D3 contains * expenses in 2017* with a leading space
and formula in cell A3 (in sheet PP)


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5 And to avoid the problem in Q3 simply do not insert any rows in sheet PP (and protect sheet PP allowing most editing but disable the row and column insert functions to make sure)

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