Next to Google Calendar, there is another great Google service in the cloud: Google Sheets. It is a spreadsheet application, like Microsoft Excel, but then hosted in the cloud. The best part of Google Sheets feature is that you only need an internet browser to access your files. There is no local application needs to be installed. So this allows you to use Google Sheets spreadsheets on your computer, tablet and even your smartphone, from everywhere you are. Only a browser and internet access are needed. In this article, we will discuss Google Sheets PowerPoint integration.

So, use your browser to enter your data about sales and production figures, or football results, anything. You can display that Google Sheets data in real-time on a television screen to inform and motivate people. Our DataPoint add-on for PowerPoint, can establish a connection to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and display its information on your PowerPoint slides, in real time, while the slide show is running. You edit the data on your smartphone and PowerPoint updates that information in real time on your screens. Looking great? This is how you do that.

Google Sheets PowerPoint Datasheet

Open a browser and go to Google Sheets. Log on with your Google account (email address and password) and locate the spreadsheet that you want to use in PowerPoint on your slides.  Open that file like this below. Just like Microsoft Excel, you will find tabs at the bottoms. Each tab corresponds to a datasheet with probably different information.

Walk around in that spreadsheet and update your information. You can also open this document on for example your smartphone. Easy when you are not at your desk.

Link PowerPoint to Google Sheets

When you have our DataPoint add-on for PowerPoint installed on your computer, you will find DataPoint in the normal ribbon.

Click to open the DataPoint menu and click the List button in the Connections group.

Navigate to the Google Sheets data provider and click the Add Query button.

When this is executed for the first time, Google will ask your permission to let DataPoint access your data. Therefor it will open a browser and start a communication over there.

Select the Google account that you want to use.

Back on the Google Sheets Query form, first, select the spreadsheets that you want to use. Based on that selection, select a sheet of your chosen spreadsheet. And finally set the (maximum) data range that you want to use on your slides.

Optionally you can choose to check that the first row of the data set contains the field names. And, very important, you can set the automatic refresh rate to e.g. every 5 seconds.

Click OK to close and you will see a preview of your imported data. Optionally, you can rename the query to a more meaningful name.

Insert a new table on your slide.  On your PowerPoint ribbon, go to Insert tab.

With this table selected, click DataPoint and then the Table button to set its linking properties.

All default values will be fine since we only have one data connection. There are more table linking options here, but everything is explained here. We are fine with the defaults, so click OK to link the table dynamically to the my customer data Google Sheet data.

That’s it. This table is now linked to your Google Sheets data and it displaying 6 information rows with the 4 first data columns. You could activate DataPoint’s data scrolling in case that you want to iterate all your data on your dataset.

Next time that you open this presentation, it will update the table content with your latest Google Sheets information. Or you can run the slideshow and display the updates in real-time on an information screen. At this point, your Google Sheets PowerPoint integration is complete.