Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

Integrating Excel and Word

Word 2003 can perform a surprising number of calculations all by itself, as you learned in the “Calculating with Tables” section in Chapter 12, “Structuring and Organizing Information with Tables.” However, it's not a dedicated spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel.

Luckily, if you've installed Excel, you can call on it whenever you need extra number-crunching power, inserting Excel spreadsheets or charts instead of building them with Word. And, of course, you can take advantage of work you've already completed in Excel, so you don't have to redo it in Word.

This integration between Word and Excel is a two-way street. Excel offers tremendous mathematical prowess, but it's obviously more limited than Word when it ...