I have been creating a bunch of business dashboards using excel which gets its data from a SQL Server data source. I have the data source setup to automatically refresh when the excel files is opened.

I now want to paste the charts from this excel file into PowerPoint and have the charts update automatically with the latest data from SQL Server. I pasted the charts as linked to the excel file and I have set the links to update automatically. I even found some VB add-ins to automatically update the links when the PowerPoint deck in in continuous slide show mode.

The problem I'm having is that it appears that even though I have the excel data source to SQL Server setup to automatically refresh it does not do this when I update / refresh the links to the charts in the PowerPoint presentation.

I think the problem is that updating links in the slide deck to the excel charts does not actually open the excel file to trigger the data source refresh in excel. It just takes the last set of data that was saved in the excel file.

Has anyone tried something like this before or run into a similar problem.