Reopening will cause any changes you made to be discarded.

If you don't need the link to be a live one then just copy pictures of
the charts from Excel and paste into PowerPoint. You could make a
macro to do this for you which you could run after updating the
workbook (or automatically on saving the workbook).

But if you really need it to be live; we can't change what PowerPoint
does - if it is going to open the file 5 times then can we stop Excel
from complaining about the file being open already?

If you are getting that message it will usually be because on opening
the workbook changes are being made to it. Either by a macro or by a
function (like TODAY() or NOW()) in a worksheet formula.

If you can eliminate these changes on open then the message should not
appear.

Bill Manville
MVP - Microsoft Excel, Oxford, England
No email replies please - respond to newsgroup