Chapter 6. Office in Overdrive: Sharing Data Between Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using the Office Clipboard	221
Inserting an Object from Another Application	225
More Office Tools for Sharing Data	234
Merging Data from Access, Excel, and Outlook	242

It's getting hard to remember the days when applications operated in splendid isolation. In those bygone days, if you needed to write a memo, you'd fire up your word processor program and start hunting and pecking. If you then realized you needed a spreadsheet to complement the text, you'd shut down the word processor, crank up your spreadsheet program, and start crunching numbers. The only tools you had at hand to connect these two documents were a paper clip and a "See attached" message.

Now, thanks to wonders such as multitasking, cut-and-paste techniques, and linking and embedding, applications have gone from isolation to collaboration. Not only can you have Word and Excel running at the same time, but you can easily share data between them, to the point where you can actually place, for example, an entire worksheet inside a Word document.

This willingness to share data between its applications is one of the best features of Office, and it's the subject of this chapter. I'll show you the full gamut of data-sharing tools, from simple cut-and-paste Clipboard techniques to sophisticated linking and embedding operations to the powerful integration tools that come with each Office application.