We have users who have powerpoint presentations linked to excel files – as worksheet links to a range of cells that includes an Excel chart object. This creates their standard slides for use in presentations, they then copy these slides to bespoke presentations for particular clients. So as we can supply the presentation to the client the links are broken so that the slide is just a standalone image.
This all worked ok but after we upgraded to Office 2010 powerpoint crashed when the links were broken.
This was our submission to Microsoft support:
You have a PowerPoint presentation containing charts linked to Excel files.
When you copy slides containing this kind of chart into a new PowerPoint presentation and then break the links, this new PowerPoint presentation stops responding.
Steps to reproduce:
- copy a chart and the surrounding data from an Excel file
- paste it into a PowerPoint presentation with Paste Special -> Paste As Microsoft Excel 2003 Worksheet Object
- go to Slide Sorter view
- copy the slide containing the chart from this PowerPoint presentation to a new presentation
- go to File – Edit Links and break the link
- at this point the second PowerPoint presentation will stop responding
Microsoft admitted this was a bug and 5 month’s later {:-| they released a Hotfix!
KB article and fix can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2597145
