Windows® 98 Unleashed

Understanding OLE

As you probably know, you can use simple cut, copy, and paste techniques to transfer text and graphics from one application to another via the Clipboard. However, these methods suffer from three major drawbacks.

First, if the data gets changed in the original application, the document containing the copy will become out-of-date. This has two consequences:

• If you know that the data needs to be updated, you have to repeat the whole copy-and-paste procedure to get the latest version of the data.

• If you don't know that the data needs to be updated (for example, if someone else changes the original data without telling you), you are stuck with an old version of the info.

Second, what if you want to make changes to the copied data? ...