Computer Act!ve - UK (2022-06-08)

48 8 – 21 June 2022 • Issue 633

In The Club

Run a club or society? Here's how your tech can make it easier

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Follow these steps to insert your Sheet into Slides

Make charts that automatically update

G

oogle Slides is an excellent (and free)

presentation tool. It doesn’t limit you

to only showing data that you’ve added to

the slides – you can also create graphs

using data stored in Google Sheets (ie,

from a spreadsheet). For our example,

we want to keep a tally of team scores in

an ongoing weekly pub quiz.

There are several ways of doing this,

but the best is to make the chart

‘dynamic’ – one that automatically

pulls in the latest data. That way, we only

need to create the chart and slide once –

it will then update itself without any

intervention from us.

Create a Sheet with data

The easiest way to open Slides is to sign

into your Google account, by visiting

http://www.google.co.uk, clicking the ‘Google

apps’ icon top right (nine small dots),

then the yellow Slides icon. Now click the

blank slide at the top, under ‘Start a new

presentation’.

There are two options for creating a

chart: you can select Insert, then Chart

and choose one of the predefined options

• Bar, Column, Line or Pie. This will
  insert a chart with dummy data, stored in
  a newly created Sheets file, which you
  can edit.
  For our purpose, a better option is to
  import an existing chart, which means
  we need to first create a new Sheets file.
  In the new file, from cell B2 going down,
  we insert the week number of the quiz:
  Week 1, Week 2 and so on. Then from cell
  B1, running horizontally, we insert the
  teams’ names. Their scores are then
  entered into the cells in the table.
  Next, we highlight all the data to select
  it, then click Insert, followed by Chart.
  This adds a column chart to our Sheet,
  but we change this by selecting ‘Bar
  chart’ from the ‘Chart type’ dropdown
  menu. We also double-click the default
  name (Team 1, Team 2 and Team 3) and
  entered the name ‘Pub quiz scores’.
  If you want to show the scores on the
  chart, click a bar of one colour (for
  example, blue), then click the ‘Data
  labels’ option in the ‘Chart editor’ sidebar.

Repeat this process by selecting the other

bar colours.

The clever thing about Google Sheets is

that the graph will automatically expand

the more data we add. For example, add

Week 5 to the bottom of the data along

with Week 5’s scores and these will

appear instantly in the chart.

Insert your Sheet into Slides

Now we’ve made our chart, we go back to

our Slides file and select Insert, Chart,

From Sheets (^1 in our screenshot above).

We choose our Sheets file from the list^2

then click Select^3. On the next page, we

choose our chart and leave the ‘Link to

spreadsheet’ box ticked. This guarantees

that any changes we make in our Google

Sheets file will be replicated in the Slide.

Finally, we click Import.

Our chart is then imported into Sheets,

letting us resize and place it wherever we

want. Once you’ve done this, click the

chain icon (top right of the chart –^1 in

screenshot below) for a menu of useful

options, including ‘Open source’^2 which

opens the raw data in the Google Sheets

file – providing a quick way of editing the

data. The ‘Unlink’ option^3 removes the

link to the spreadsheet, turning the chart

into a fixed one, so the data won’t update

automatically. If you choose this option,

you’ll need to click the

Update button^4 to ensure

the latest data in your

Sheet also appears in your

presentation.

Click the chain icon for

options including Unlink,

which stops your Slide being

automatically updated

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