Windows XP in a Nutshell

Name

Object Packager — \windows\system32\packager.exe

Synopsis

Create “packages” for insertion into documents.

To Open

Command Prompt → packager

Description

Many larger applications support the dragging and dropping of data from one program to another. For example, you can highlight a dozen cells in Microsoft Excel, drag them into a Microsoft Word document, and Word will insert the dropped data as a new table. Furthermore, under certain circumstances, there will be an active link between the two applications so that you could make a change to one of the spreadsheet cells and the change would be reflected in the Word document immediately.

As you might expect, there’s more going on behind the scenes to make all this possible than might be immediately apparent. Indeed, Windows creates a “package” containing the selected data and then inserts that package into the target document. Microsoft has given many names to this technology, but their first, Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), is the one that has stuck in many users’ minds

Object Packager is a tool used to create such a package manually, useful if you need more flexibility than is achieved with drag-and-drop.

The Object Packager window has two panes: the Appearance pane displays the icon that will represent the package and the Content pane displays the name of the file that contains the information you want to package. To choose an icon, click the Insert Icon button. To choose a file, go to File → Import.

When you’re done, go to ...