Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)

Linked and embedded objects are both chunks of data, like drawings or spreadsheets, nestled within a document in one Office program, but actually created by another.

You edit them in whatever program created them, but behind the scenes, there’s a big difference in where their data is stored. A linked object’s data is stored in a separate file (what Microsoft calls the source file). An embedded object, on the other hand, is an integral part of the file in which it appears. All its data is stored right there in the document. That’s why an embedded object bloats the file size of the document containing it. However, embedding an object means that you’ll never have to endure that sickening jolt when you realize you’re missing an important speech that you copied to your laptop (as you might if you had only used linking).

The whole process is called Object Linking and Embedding, or OLE for short. You can’t get very far on a Microsoft newsgroup or discussion board without seeing that acronym. At user group meetings, the preferred pronunciation is “olé”.

Creating Linked Objects

To add a linked object to your Office document, you first have to create that object in a program that offers OLE features. On the Mac, that includes Word, Excel, and Power-Point 2008. For example, you can use linking to incorporate a drawing, spreadsheet, or chart into a Word document; weirdly enough, even another Word document can be incorporated into a Word document.

When you’ve created ...