Office 2013 In Depth

Understanding Object Linking and Embedding

Microsoft’s object linking and embedding, or OLE, has been around since the early 1990s. With OLE, you can create “compound” documents that consist of data from more than one application. Breaking down the name (object linking and embedding) into its component parts is the easiest way to define what OLE actually is. An object can be anything from worksheet data or a chart in Excel, to a slide in PowerPoint, to an image in a Word document, to pretty much any selectable entity in any of the Office applications. So OLE works with application objects.

Now let’s tackle linking. When you link an object to a document or other application file, you are creating a connection between the source file and your current ...