Links to Excel break

Problem

You have a PowerPoint presentation that includes links to specific ranges of cells in an Excel worksheet.
You move the presentation and the workbook to another computer and, while PowerPoint can find the workbook, the links still don't work.

Solution

The problem might be that the worksheet was created on a German language version of Office but has been moved to an English language version. To quote PowerPoint MVP John Wilson, who identified this problem for a visitor to the PowerPoint section of Microsoft Answers:

If you look at the link address in English it ends R2C2:R5C5
The R & C stand for Row and Column - Row2,Column2 >>Row5,Column5
The German for Row is Zeile and for Column is Spalte
So (not very clever of MSFT) in German the link ends Z2S2:Z5S5

John went on to provide some VBA code that will fix the problem. As always, it's best to run this sort of code on a COPY of your valuable presentations:

Sub G2E()
    Dim regX As Object
    Dim osld As Slide
    Dim oshp As Shape
    Dim b_found As Boolean
    Dim strLink As String
    On Error Resume Next
    Set regX = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    With regX
        .Global = True
        .Pattern = "Z(\d)S(\d)"
    End With
    For Each osld In ActivePresentation.Slides
        For Each oshp In osld.Shapes
            Err.Clear
               strLink = oshp.LinkFormat.SourceFullName
                    If Err = 0 Then
                        b_found = regX.Test(strLink)
                        If b_found = True Then
                            strLink = regX.Replace(strLink, "R$1C$2")
                           oshp.LinkFormat.SourceFullName = strLink
                        End If
                    End If
        Next oshp
    Next osld
    Set regX = Nothing
End Sub

See How do I use VBA code in PowerPoint? to learn how to use this example code.

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