Introducing PenguChart: copy Google Slides without breaking linked charts

If you have ever duplicated a Google Slides presentation full of charts, you know the trap: the copy looks perfect, but every chart is still wired to the original Google Sheets file. Update the copy's numbers and you silently edit the original. Hand the copy to a client and their "Update" button pulls your live internal data.

Today we are launching PenguChart – Copy Slides & Linked Charts, a Google Slides™ add-on that fixes this properly.

The problem nobody warns you about

Google Slides links charts to spreadsheets by ID. File → Make a copy duplicates the slides, but the chart links keep pointing at the old spreadsheet - and Google offers no way to change a linked chart's source afterwards. The only manual fix is to copy each spreadsheet yourself, then delete and re-insert every single chart, one by one, and rebuild positions, groups and layers by hand. For a monthly client report with a dozen charts, that is an afternoon gone.

What PenguChart does instead

One run of the copy assistant:

• Copies the presentation and its spreadsheets together. Up to ten copies at once, saved to any Drive folder you choose.
• Relinks every chart in the copy to the fresh spreadsheet copies - verifiable in Slides under Tools → Linked objects.
• Leaves your originals untouched. The process only ever writes to the new files.

Three ways to handle your spreadsheets

Charts from several source files? You decide what the copy looks like:

• Individual copies - each linked spreadsheet is duplicated on its own. The safe default.
• One combined spreadsheet - every tab from every source lands in a single new file. If two sources both have a tab called "Data", PenguChart renames them automatically ("Data", "Data (2)") and keeps all chart references correct.
• Only used tabs - the lean option: just the tabs your charts need, including the tabs their data actually comes from.

The details that usually break

Rebuilding a chart is easy. Rebuilding it exactly is not - and that is where we spent most of our time:

• Grouped charts (even groups inside groups) are taken apart, relinked and reassembled automatically.
• Stacking order is restored - a chart that sat behind a text box and in front of a background card stays exactly there.
• Rotation and resizing carry over precisely, down to deliberately squashed sparkline-style charts.
• Big decks are processed in chunks, so presentations with dozens of charts do not hit Google's script time limits.

One honest limitation

Chart effects applied inside Slides - cropping, borders, recolor, shadow, brightness, contrast, transparency, reflection - are read-only in Google's API. No tool can copy them, including ours. PenguChart deals with this transparently: the assistant lists every affected chart before you copy, and can optionally remove the effects from the original so that original and copy match.

Free while in beta

PenguChart is free during the public beta. In return we would love your feedback: there is a bug report button right inside the add-on, and a support page with a feature request form. We read everything.

Get started

1. Install PenguChart from the Google Workspace Marketplace.
2. Open a presentation with linked Sheets charts.
3. Extensions → PenguChart → Start copy assistant.

Your next copy will be a real one. 🐧