<div>
Added Excel zone to this in case any of you Excel experts has seen anything similar, and the PPT Zone is eerily silent.
</div>


<div>
Thanks for responding - I am already doing that as a workaround, but I was really wondering if anyone could explain why this behaviour might have changed.
</div>


<div>
I haven't really got the sort of answer I wanted, but thanks for participating - I'm getting fed up with looking at this at the top of my list all the time!
</div>


<div>
<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
One of my users has a large PPT presentation that has multiple OLE links to chart objects and cells in 8 different Excel workbooks. &nbsp;There are many different links to each workbook. &nbsp;She reports that in the Links update dialog she used to see just the 8 workbooks (I'm not sure I believe this, but she could be right), and colud update them easily. &nbsp;Now each individual link shows up in the dialog box. <br />
<br />
When updating the links either from the dialog box or when opening the file, PPT now seems to be opening each file visibly in Excel and closing it again for each link, not just for each file. &nbsp;This naturally takes forever. &nbsp;She sometimes also gets the message 'File is unavailable and cannot be updated' when selecting just one link for update (all the linked Excel files definitely exist).<br />
<br />
I don't think anything in the environment has changed, and the user claims no changes to have been made to her presentation or the linked Excel files. Any ideas?
</div>
</div>


One of my users has a large PPT presentation that has multiple OLE links to chart objects and cells in 8 different Excel workbooks.  There are many different links to each workbook.  She reports that in the Links update dialog she used to see just the 8 workbooks (I'm not sure I believe this, but she could be right), and colud update them easily.  Now each individual link shows up in the dialog box. 

When updating the links either from the dialog box or when opening the file, PPT now seems to be opening each file visibly in Excel and closing it again for each link, not just for each file.  This naturally takes forever.  She sometimes also gets the message 'File is unavailable and cannot be updated' when selecting just one link for update (all the linked Excel files definitely exist).

I don't think anything in the environment has changed, and the user claims no changes to have been made to her presentation or the linked Excel files. Any ideas?

Powerpoint Excel links update issues

Microsoft Office is an integrated suite of applications that includes Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Visio and InfoPath, along with a number of tools to assist in making the individual components work together. Coding within and between the projects is done in Visual Basic for Applications, known as VBA.

Microsoft Office

PowerPoint is a slide show presentation program currently developed by Microsoft. PowerPoint presentations consist of a number of individual pages or "slides" that may contain text, graphics, sound, movies, and other objects, which may be arranged freely. The presentation can be printed, displayed live on a computer, or navigated through at the command of the presenter. Slides can also form the basis of webcasts.

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft Excel topics include formulas, formatting, VBA macros and user-defined functions, and everything else related to the spreadsheet user interface, including error messages.