Create It Once, Use It Again

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One of the great things about using a multi-application suite like Office is the way you can reuse what you create. You can open your Excel spreadsheet in your sales report. You can attach an organization chart to the announcement of the new spring promotions. You can add a voice-over segment to a section of a speech you're testing out with your coworkers. You can use these different items in your Word document by importing them as objects.

Although you can copy and paste these items into a document, keeping the data current can be a problem if your information changes often. If you paste a segment of your Excel worksheet in your document, and then the original worksheet changes, your document will be out of date. To resolve this so that you can create these multi-dimensional documents and still keep your documents current, you can link the objects to their original files using object linking and embedding (OLE) and Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE).

Note

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You can import objects from programs outside the Office applications. As long as the program supports OLE and DDE, you can link and edit that program's objects.