Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 18: the graphics programs of office x 659

Once you’ve highlighted a portion of the picture in this way, you can cut out the

selection, removing your ex from the picture forever, for example. You can also

apply certain effects to that portion of the picture inside or outside the lasso,

applying a dry brush effect to the background while leaving the people inside the

lasso clear.

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 sepa-

rate 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 that contains 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

acron ...