What’s the difference between embedding something and doing an ordinary paste from the Clipboard? If you paste text into Excel from Notepad—an application that doesn’t support embedding—it arrives as if you typed it directly in the active worksheet cell. (If the text spans multiple lines, Excel delivers each new line to a new cell in the current column.) What you paste, in other words, becomes ordinary worksheet data.

If you embed text from Word (or another word processor that supports embedding), the text appears to land in the cell that is active when you perform the embedding, but in fact it floats above the worksheet cells in an object layer. Excel displays the text in an opaque rectangle that’s initially aligned with the active cell; you can drag the rectangle to reposition the embedded object.

To embed text copied from Word, click the arrow under the Paste button on the Home tab, click Paste Special, and choose Microsoft Word Document Object, as shown in Figure 31-1. As Figure 31-2 shows, when you select the embedded text object (we dragged it away from the edge to show the bounding box), the word Object, followed by a number, appears in the Name box; handles appear on the object’s bounding rectangle (you can use these to change the size of the rectangle); and an EMBED formula appears on the formula line. You can’t do much with this formula because EMBED isn’t a worksheet function, but it is helpful to identify the program from which the embedded data originated.

Figure 31-1. The Paste Special dialog box offers several formats you can use for linking or embedding.

Figure 31-2. Embedding text creates a movable object whose source is identified by an EMBED formula.

More important, perhaps, if you double-click the embedded object, you can edit it using the application that created it. If you double-click the Word object in Figure 31-2, for example, Excel displays a thick border around the embedded object. The Excel ribbon is replaced by the Word ribbon, leaving you with a kind of hybrid user interface. At this point, you are essentially working in Word, although the Excel context remains visible. When you finish using Word to edit the object, you can click outside it (back on the worksheet), and the Word paraphernalia disappears.

This kind of object editing is called editing in place. Not all applications that support embedding offer it. If you double-click an embedded object from an application that doesn’t support editing in place, Excel launches a regular copy of that application (although it might include a command on the application’s File menu for updating your Excel document with the changes you make).

In cases where embedding and static pasting are both options, you should favor embedding if you want to retain the ability to edit the material in its native application—or if you want to be able to apply object-formatting commands to the incoming material.