Microsoft® Excel® 2010 Inside Out

Embedding vs. Static Pasting

What’s the difference between embedding something and doing an ordinary paste from the Clipboard? If you paste text into Excel from Notepad—an application that doesn’t support embedding—it arrives as if you typed it directly in the active worksheet cell. (If the text spans multiple lines, Excel delivers each new line to a new cell in the current column.) What you paste, in other words, becomes ordinary worksheet data.

If you embed text from Word (or another word processor that supports embedding), the text appears to land in the cell that is active when you perform the embedding, but in fact it floats above the worksheet cells in an object layer. Excel displays the text in an opaque rectangle that’s initially aligned ...