Sharing Information Between Microsoft Office Documents

Sharing Information Between Microsoft Office Documents (con't)

There are two ways in which to share objects between MS Office applications. You may use linked objects or embedded objects to add all or part of a file created in an Office program (or any program that supports linking and embedding) to another file.

the difference between these two methods is where the actual data is stored and how it can be updated after it is placed in the destination file.

We'll be doing a lot of talking about files. Let's consider a project where we have a Word document containing text and part of an Excel spreadsheet that we've incorporated via one of these methods. The "source" file is the original docoument containing the portion of the spreadsheet that we wish to use. The "destination" file is the document in which this information will be placed. In this case, our source is the Excel spreadsheet, and the destination is our Word document.

The following information will help you decide when it's best to embed or link.

Embedding objects - When you embed an object, a copy of the object is inserted into the destination document. There's no link to the original file. When you change information in the source document, no changes will be reflected in the destination document. The actual data for the object is stored within the destination file. To make changes to the embedded object, double click it and it will launch the original application the source file was in.
Linking objects - Information is updated when you modify the original source file when you use a linked object. This dynamic updating is very handy for things such as the aforementioned monthly report. You can open up the Excel spreadsheet that is referenced within your Word document. Make changes to the spreadsheet, close Excel, and when you open your Word document... viola! The changes are already there. If that object is linked to ten other Word files, the changes are already in those ten files, too!
The linked data is stored in the original source file. Your destination file will store the location of the source file and it will display a representation of this data. Using linked objects is a good idea when you want to keep your file size small. You will need to have all involved files (both sources and the final destination file) when you want to print the file or share it with another user. You cannot give them just the destination file on a floppy disk if you want them to have all the information within the document as you intended.

Although the lead in was long, actually linking or embedding an object is fast and easy.