Extracting Powerpoint 2007 chart data to Excel, broken links.

Hi,

I have a Powerpoint file that has a number of relatively complicated graphs in it, I need to update these graphs to include the data for November. But this Powerpoint was created by a colleague who has now left the company and had the linked Excel sheets stored on his PC.

The graphs are embedded Excel graphs, but when I right click to edit data, it says that the linked Excel files are unavailable. The data is obviously stored within the Powerpoint sheet though as the graphs display correctly and there is no way they could be accessing his now deactivated network share.

How can I extract the current data, allowing me to update the graphs?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Hello there,

I have a similar problem and was searching the internet for a solution when I came by your post. Have you been able to get a solution for this? If yes, it would be kind of you to share it with me.

In my situation the person who has made the charts is not traceable, IO also have the data for the charts in a PPT table, but the charts were actually made of an Excel file, which is missing.

Is there any way that we can put the tables back in excel and ask PPT to pick the data from those tables in Excel?

Any help in this regard will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and regards,

Ramana.

Hi,

I had a similar problem... then I remember that a pptx file is in fact a zip file and that it is possible to access all the information that is inside the pptx file!
Follow these steps:

1. Change the extention of your ppt file from "Myfile.pptx" to "Myfile.zip"
2. open the new file with winzip or similar unzip software
3. in the folder strucutre that will appear try to find were your chart is located
it will probably be under /ppt/charts/ and the name similar as Charts1.xml
4. save that .xml file on your computer
5. goto excel and open the file (you will have to change the filter of the open file dialogue to *.* to show all the available files)
choose "open as an xml table"
6. try to locate were the data is stored (the table can be quite large so it will probably not be straightforward but it is possible!) Your data will probably be presented in different subsets of different columns.
Tip: use the FIND option with "xls" as search string to guide you.

I do not know if it is possible to extract these data with code...

Hope this helps someone - let me know!

Regards,