[cap-talk] [Off-topic] Document linking in Microsoft OLE

[David Hopwood]

James A. Donald wrote:
> James A. Donald wrote:
>  >> I offered you three different interpretations of your
>  >> Word/Excel example, with four different behaviors and
>  >> user intents, and you neglected to tell me which one
>  >> you had in mind.
> 
> Karp, Alan H:
>  > I open Word which has a link to a spreadsheet, which
>  > means it has a capability to the spreadsheet.
> 
> I presume you mean that you have a Microsoft Word file
> that has a link to an *external* spreadsheet file
> 
> In my current copy of Microsoft, Office 2007, there
> seems to be no easy way to create such a link.  I can
> easily embed a spreadsheet file *inside* a Microsoft
> Word file, but there is no obvious way to durably and
> dynamically reference an external Excel file.  Perhaps
> there is some way to do that, but I do not know how, and
> I rather doubt it can be done.

It could be done in Word 6/Excel 4 (IIRC) and in
Word 2000/Excel 2000 (definitely), so I would be rather
surprised if the functionality had been removed.

Using Word/Excel 2000:
 - select the .xls file in Explorer
 - press Ctrl-C
 - in Word, click Paste Special... in the Edit menu
 - click Paste Link, then OK.

(Yes, this is one of those features that is so obscure and
undiscoverable -- besides having inherent flaws if you want
documents to be transportable between systems -- that no-one
ever uses it. I only know about it from when it was very
briefly hyped as a cool new feature of OLE 2.0.)

-- 
David Hopwood <david.hopwood at industrial-designer.co.uk>