Here’s the dirty secret behind even the slickest slide show or marketing brochure—you can’t always be sure important details like pricing, product availability, and orders are updated.
Google (GOOG) and Salesforce (CRM) think they’ve figured out a way around the usual solution of manually cutting and pasting in data from other documents, spreadsheets, and databases. The two companies have created new connections between Salesforce’s sales management system and Google’s spreadsheet application, Sheets, along with its presentation creation tool, Slides.
The net effect is that Salesforce data used in the Google apps for things like sales forecasts, lead generation updates, and corporate pitches will stay updated automatically without the usual human intervention. It removes the need to go in everyone once in a while to manually replace outdated numbers.
The connection works in reverse, as well. That means, changing a number in a Google spreadsheet or presentation will result in tweaking a Salesforce sales record, as well.
The new connections will roll out gradually in coming months. They’re made possible by several application programming interfaces—which help apps share data between each other—introduced Wednesday by Google during its annual developer conference in Mountain View, Calif.
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Several other cloud software companies are planning to connect their services to Google Sheets and Google Slides using the new APIs, including Anaplan (which specializes in budget and planning apps), Asana (project management), Sage (accounting and back-office applications), and SAP (with its new small-business offering, SAP Anywhere).