How to Embed Linked Google Sheets Charts in Google Slides

When you build a presentation in Google Slides, your charts and data tables often need to reflect the latest numbers from a Google Sheets spreadsheet. If you manually create a chart inside Slides, it becomes a static image. The moment the source data changes in Sheets, your presentation is immediately outdated, and you must delete the old chart and rebuild it from scratch.

Google Slides solves this problem with Linked Charts. This feature allows you to embed a chart from Google Sheets directly into your presentation while maintaining a live data connection. When the underlying spreadsheet data changes, a single click updates the chart in your presentation automatically.

How to Insert a Linked Chart from Google Sheets

1. First, ensure you have a chart already created inside a Google Sheets spreadsheet. (If you do not have one, open your Sheets data, select it, click Insert > Chart, and customise it).
2. Open your Google Slides presentation.
3. Navigate to the specific slide where you want the chart to appear.
4. Click Insert in the top menu bar.
5. Select Chart from the dropdown menu.
6. Click From Sheets.
7. A file picker will appear. Browse or search for the Google Sheets file containing your chart. Click on it and press Select.
8. If the spreadsheet contains multiple charts, you will be asked to choose which one to import. Select the correct chart.
9. Ensure the checkbox labelled Link to spreadsheet is ticked. This is the critical step that maintains the live data connection.
10. Click Import.

The chart will appear on your slide, fully formatted and interactive.

How to Update a Linked Chart

When someone updates the source data in Google Sheets (for example, adding new sales figures for the current month), your chart in Google Slides will not update automatically in real-time. Instead, Google Slides will notify you that an update is available.

1. Open your presentation in Google Slides.
2. Click on the linked chart. You will see a small button appear in the top-right corner of the chart labelled Update.
3. Click the Update button.

The chart will instantly refresh, pulling in the latest data from the source spreadsheet. Your presentation is now current without any manual rebuilding.

How to Unlink a Chart

If you no longer want the chart to be connected to the spreadsheet (for example, you want to freeze the data at a specific point in time for an archived presentation), you can break the link.

1. Click on the linked chart.
2. Click the small dropdown arrow next to the “Update” button (or right-click the chart).
3. Select Unlink.

The chart will become a static image. It will retain its current appearance, but it will no longer receive updates from Google Sheets. This action cannot be undone; you would need to re-import the chart from Sheets to re-establish the link.

Best Practices for Linked Charts

• Always format your chart in Google Sheets before importing it into Slides. The chart’s colours, labels, and axes are controlled by the Sheets formatting, not by Slides.
• If you share the presentation with others, they will also need access to the source Google Sheets file to see the linked data. Otherwise, they will only see a static snapshot.