Excel Contents in Microsoft Word

Often, you’ll need to use an Excel spreadsheet in Word as a reference. Perhaps because Word doesn't perform the powerful calculations that Excel provides (though Word does do simpler calculations).

There are three methods of doing this and each has different results.

Paste the Contents

In Excel, select the cells you want to display in Word, copy (Ctrl+C), and then paste into your Word document. It is placed as a Word table and you can then edit the cells in Word. There is no connection to the spreadsheet from whence it came.

Link to the Excel Workbook

The advantage of creating a linked Excel sheet in Word is that any changes made in the Excel sheet are automatically updated in your Word document, provided the Excel file's changes have been saved and the Word file has been updated.

You can double-click the object or right-click it and choose Edit to automatically open the workbook and edit it in Excel.

In Word, click Insert Object and then click the Create from File tab. In the File name box, type the name of the Excel sheet file you want to link, or click Browse to select from files on your computer.

Create the link by selecting the Link to file checkbox.

You can also choose the “Display as icon” option if you just want to display an icon for an Excel file rather than the worksheet itself.

The drawback to this option is that you must send the workbook to the recipient if you are sending the document, or they will not have access to the Excel file or its information.

Embed the Excel Workbook in Word

This way you’ll be able to edit the spreadsheet in Word itself by double-clicking it. The Excel workbook is literally attached to the Word file and travels with it wherever it goes.

Follow the same procedure as linking (above) but do not check the Link to file checkbox.

You can also choose the Display as icon option if you just want to display an icon for an excel spreadsheet rather than the sheet itself.

The drawback to this option is that the size of the spreadsheet object is added to the Word document size.

Push Excel Data to Word

If you want to push data from Excel to Word, as opposed to a mail merge, then try this knowledgebase entry at VBA Express.