Plays Well With Others

By Gail Van Landingham

Recently, a friend asked me how to insert a Visio drawing into Word. Word does play well with other members of Microsoft Office, such as Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Excel. You can take advantage of the work you've already completed in these other programs. Or you can start a new Excel workbook or Visio drawing right in Word. The following instructions are for Excel and Visio, but the basic instructions work for the entire Microsoft Office System.

Inserting a New Excel Spreadsheet Using the Toolbar

Click in your document where you want to insert the spreadsheet.
Click the Insert Microsoft Excel Worksheet button on the toolbar.
Drag the pointer down and across the grid to select the size of your worksheet.

Inserting a New Excel Spreadsheet or Visio Drawing Using Menu Commands

Click in your document where you want to insert the spreadsheet.
Click Object from the Insert menu.
On the Create New tab, select one of the following, and then click OK:

Microsoft Excel Worksheet
Microsoft Visio
Any other member of Microsoft Office installed on your PC

Inserting an Existing Excel Spreadsheet or Visio Drawing

You'll get the choice of linking or embedding the file. Word embeds the object by default.

Click Object from the Insert menu.
Click the Create from File tab.
Click the Browse button to navigate to the file.
Select your file.
Click Insert.
Click the Link to file button if you want to link the file instead of embedding it.
Click OK.

A Note About Linking vs. Embedding

When you choose Link to File and you make changes to the inserted object, you're editing the original spreadsheet or drawing. Changes you make in the source file change the linked object. That's the good part.

The bad part is if you want to send your file via e-mail or copy it to a CD, you must distribute the inserted files along with your Word file. The inserted files must always be in the same relative path as set up in the link.

Linking is a natural thing for a true desktop publisher like FrameMaker. In Word, you may be adding a level of complexity that's hard to maintain. Consider these issues:

Will the spreadsheet or Visio drawing be used in more than one Word document? If yes, linking may be a good idea.
Will the Word document be distributed to other people? If yes, linking may not be the best solution.

Visio Tips

Create One Drawing Page Per File

Save each page as a separate file if your Visio drawing has multiple pages. Make copies of the file (one file for each page). In the first file, save the first page, and delete all the remaining pages. In the next file, save the second page, and delete the other pages. Repeat until done. You are inserting a single drawing when you insert each file.

Contrast Inserting a Visio Object vs. Inserting a Picture

Each Visio object you insert will increase the size of your Word file considerably. If you are adding many Visio objects, balance the following considerations:

Inserting a picture.
Using this method, you'll export your Visio drawing to the format of your choice (such as JPG, GIF, or WMF), and then insert it as a picture. You lose the convenience of embedding the Visio file, but you'll gain a lot of disk space.
Inserting Visio objects.

This is convenient for a few Visio drawings but may increase your file size considerably if you have many drawings. In our company, the engineering staff prefers to insert each Visio drawing as an embedded object. The Word file is printed to PDF, and that's the format distributed to users. So, file size is not an important consideration.

Inserting Word in Word

A friend asked me how to insert some boilerplate text that she was using in many Word documents. She said she was using the same text in about 100 documents, and she wanted to maintain it only in one place. I told her to use the same technique for inserting an existing object:

Click Object from the Insert menu.
Click the Create from File tab.

By using the Link to file option, you can maintain the text in one place and insert it into many Word documents.