Linking Data

Table of content

You can transfer and link many kinds of data among Office applications. The following are some examples:

You can insert and link part or all of an Excel worksheet or an Excel chart into a Word document or a PowerPoint slide.

You can insert and link part or all of a Word document into an Excel worksheet or a PowerPoint slide.

You can insert and link a PowerPoint slide into a Word document or an Excel worksheet.

NOTE
You can't link data from the Office Tools programs (such as Microsoft Equation Editor). These programs can be used only for embedding data.

You can transfer and link either a selected part of a document or an entire document. To transfer and link part of a document, do the following:

Select the data in the source document, and choose Copy from the source program's Edit menu (don't choose Cut!) to copy the data to the Clipboard.
NOTE
To link a PowerPoint slide to another document, you must be in Outline or Slide Sorter view (choose Slide Sorter from the View menu), and you must select a single slide.

Place the insertion point at the position in the receiving document where you want to insert the data, and choose Paste Special from the receiving program's Edit menu.

In the Paste Special dialog box, select the Paste Link option, and then select the desired data format in the As list.

NOTE
If the Paste Link option is not available, this means that the data in the Clipboard— or the selected format— can't be linked or the source program doesn't support linking.

If you want to link an entire document, you can select the whole document in step 1 above, or you can use the following alternative method:

Place the insertion point at the position in the receiving document where you want to insert the data.

Choose Object from the receiving program's Insert menu, and click the Create From File tab in the Object dialog box. (In PowerPoint and Access, the dialog box is titled Insert Object. Also, Create From File is an option button that you select, rather than a tab.)

Select the Link To File option, and in the File Name box, enter the name of the document you want to insert. (In PowerPoint and Access, the option is called Link and the text box is called File.) Click the Browse button if you need help locating the file. See Figure 35-2.

TIP
Display Your Data as an Icon
If you select the Display As Icon option in either the Paste Special or the Object dialog box (the Insert Object dialog box for PowerPoint and Access), the receiving program displays an icon representing the linked data rather than displaying the data itself. Also, when you print the document, only the icon is printed. After you select Display As Icon, you can click the Change Icon button to change the icon and the caption that are displayed in the document. To view the linked data within the source program, use one of the methods for editing linked data, which will be described next. Using icons to display linked data is a convenient way to present various types of information in a compact format within a document that's intended to be viewed on the screen.

You must edit linked data by making the changes within the source document. To do this, you can use one of the following methods:

Run the source program and open the source document.

Figure 35-2. Inserting and linking an entire document.

Select the block of linked data in the receiving document (or the icon that represents it), or simply place the insertion point anywhere within the data. Then point to Linked Item (where Item is a description of the selected data, such as Worksheet Object) on the Edit menu, and choose either Open Link or Edit Link from the submenu that appears:

(The commands that appear on this submenu depend on the source program and the nature of the data.) The source document will then be opened in the source program, and you can edit the data.

For some types of linked data formats (for example, Picture or Bitmap in a Word document), you can open the source document in the source program by simply double-clicking the linked data in the receiving document.

CAUTION
Although you might be able to edit certain types of linked data directly within the receiving document (for example, Unformatted Text in a Word document), your changes will be overwritten the next time the data is updated! However, formatting changes (such as applying the bold or italic format to text) will generally be preserved when the data is updated.

You can modify one or more links within a document by choosing Links from the Edit menu to open the Links dialog box, which lists all the links contained in the active document. The appearance of the dialog box varies among Office applications; Figure 35-3 shows how it looks in Word. To modify a link, select it in the list. To simultaneously modify several links, select them by clicking the first one and then pressing the Ctrl key while clicking each additional one.

click to view at full size.

Figure 35-3. Modifying links in the active document.

You can now do one or more of the following— but note that not all these actions are available in all Office applications:

You can make a link either automatic or manual by selecting the Automatic or Manual option at the bottom of the dialog box. By default, a link is automatic, which means that the data is automatically updated whenever the receiving document is opened and whenever the data is modified in the source document while the receiving document is open. If you make a link manual, it won't be updated until you explicitly issue a command. You might want to make links manual to avoid slowdowns while working with a document that contains many links or linked data whose source is modified frequently.

If the selected link is manual, you can update it by clicking the Update Now button.

To change the name or location of the source document for the linked data, click the Change Source button to open the Change Source dialog box. (You might also be able to change the description of the data location within the source document— for example, the range of cells in a spreadsheet.) You would need to do this to repair a link after the source document has been moved or renamed.
To specify a new source document, in the Change Source dialog box open the folder that contains that document and enter its filename into the File Name box. To select a new data location within the source document, click the Item button and enter a description of the location into the Item dialog box. For a Word document, you would enter a bookmark name. For an Excel workbook, you would enter the name of the worksheet and the row and column range within this worksheet, as in the following example:
```
         Sheet1!R1C1:R2C2  
```
To open the source document within the source program, click the Open Source button. This has the same effect as using one of the techniques for editing linked data, which were described above.

To remove the link, click the Break Link button. The data will become an integral part of the receiving document, just as if you had copied it statically. After doing this, you won't be able to restore the link.

In Word, to prevent the link from being updated, select the Locked option.

TIP
A good way to help ensure that the source document is always available to maintain the link is to place both the source document and the receiving document together within the same folder.

A Linking Example

click to view at full size.

Figure 35-4. An Excel worksheet that includes a chart.

Imagine that you have created an Excel worksheet containing the daily prices for a commodity— wheat— and you have included a chart illustrating those prices for a past period of 25 days. (See Figure 35-4.) You now want to write an article in Word that describes the price action over that period. To link a copy of the Excel chart to your report, you would perform the following steps:

In the Excel worksheet, click the chart to select it, and choose Copy from Excel's Edit menu.

In the Word document containing your report, place the insertion point at the position where you want the chart, choose Paste Special from Word's Edit menu, and complete the dialog box as shown in Figure 35-5. The resulting report is shown in Figure 35-6.

Figure 35-5. Linking the Excel chart to a Word document.

ON THE WEB
The Futures.xls and Futures.doc example files are on the Running Office 2000 Reader's Corner page. For information about connecting to this Web site, read the Introduction.

The following are some advantages of linking this chart rather than embedding it:

Only the link and the information required to draw the chart are copied into the receiving document. If you embedded the chart, the entire workbook, including all the price data, would be copied into the receiving document, significantly increasing its size. (Although you would see only the chart, the workbook data is also stored in the document so that you can edit both the data and the chart.)

The same chart can be linked to additional Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or other documents. The chart will then be updated within all receiving documents whenever you change the price data in the Excel worksheet.

click to view at full size.

Figure 35-6. The Excel chart shown in Figure 35-4 linked to a Word document.

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