Pasting using the Worksheet Object format provides a completely faithful replication of the appearance of your Excel table—including any graphical elements that happened to be within your Excel selection. It also lets you edit the pasted table using Excel commands and features rather than Word ones. For example, if you want to apply a custom numeric format to your data after pasting it as an object into Word, you can do that by double-clicking the object. When you do this, the user interface of Word temporarily merges with Excel, as shown in Figure 32-3. After you edit the object and click any other part of the Word document, the Excel ribbon is replaced by the Word ribbon, and the worksheet column and row headings disappear.

Figure 32-3. When you double-click an embedded Excel object, the Word ribbon is temporarily replaced by the Excel ribbon, letting you use Excel formatting and editing features to modify the object.

An important peculiarity to note about Excel objects embedded in Word documents is that Excel embeds the entire workbook, not only the selection you copied to the Clipboard. The sheet tabs at the bottom of the Excel object shown in Figure 32-3 illustrate this point. Although the editing window that appears in Word when you double-click the Excel object has the same dimensions as the original selection in Excel, you can scroll to any part of the current worksheet and even switch to another worksheet in the same workbook. When you return to Word (by clicking away from the embedded object), Word treats any scrolling you do as an edit to the embedded object. If you switch from Sheet1 to Sheet2 while you’re editing, you’ll see Sheet2 when you return to your Word document.

The RTF and HTML formats preserve the font and numeric formatting of your Excel selection. They differ in the way they preserve that formatting. RTF (Rich Text Format) is a method of encoding formatting information that has been available for a long time in Microsoft Office and other kinds of documents. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the newer, default format for pasting into Word (the format you get if you press Ctrl+V), and it’s the language that renders web pages in your browser. Both formats generate tables in Word, maintaining the cell alignment you had in Excel and allowing for manipulation via the Table commands in Word. Neither format includes graphical elements that are part of your Excel selection.

HTML is more likely than RTF to render the formatting of your Excel selection accurately. But you might want to experiment to see which format suits your purposes more effectively. If you don’t like the results you get, undo it and try again with a different format.

Use Unformatted Text and Unformatted Unicode Text when you do not want your Clipboard data to become a table in Word. Both formats transfer data from the Clipboard as though you had typed it in your Word document. They use tab characters between the columns of your original Excel selection and return characters at the ends of lines. Ordinarily, the result is that data that was aligned neatly in Excel is no longer aligned in Word. Use the Unicode format if your data includes characters outside the regular ANSI range—for example, characters from non-Latin alphabets. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter which of these two formats you use.

The Picture (Windows Metafile), Bitmap, and Picture (Enhanced Metafile) formats produce more or less faithful graphical representations of your original Excel selection (including any graphical elements associated with it). Because the results are pictures, not tables, you can modify them with the picture-formatting features in Word.

Of the three available picture formats, Bitmap usually provides the most faithful replication of original appearances—at the cost of additional file size. For tables not accompanied by graphical elements, the Picture (Windows Metafile) format is usually more than adequate. Experiment to see which works best for you.

You can paste-link any of the formats shown in Figure 32-2 and described in the preceding sections by selecting Paste Link in the Paste Special dialog box. When you do this, Word creates a field that references the source of your Excel data. The field is a code (comparable to an external-reference formula in Excel) that tells the application how to update the data if you request a manual update. The code also tells the application how to locate the data for editing if you double-click the linked information in your Word document. You can see the code by clicking the File tab in Word, clicking Options, selecting the Advanced category, and then selecting the Show Field Codes Instead Of Their Values check box, located in the Show Document Content section. Figure 32-4 shows the cryptic result, which you probably don’t want to leave like this in your Word document.

Figure 32-4. The Show Field Codes Instead Of Their Values option hides the objects while revealing the underlying links.

Links from Excel into Word are automatic by default, which means that anytime the Excel source is changed, the Word document is automatically adjusted. You can switch to manual linking by going to the Links dialog box shown in Figure 32-5. To get there, right-click the Excel table in the Word document, click Linked Worksheet Object, and then click Links.

If you’re using manual updating, you can also force an update by clicking Update Now in the Links dialog box. A simpler way to update your table is to select it and press F9.

Figure 32-5. In the Links dialog box in Word, you can switch between manual and automatic updating, modify the link specifications, or break the connection.

An alternative way to create a link between a Word document and an Excel document is to use a hyperlink. With an Excel range on the Clipboard, you can click the Home tab in Word, click the arrow below the Paste command, and then click Paste Special. The Paste Special dialog box displays the usual list of formats, but the Word Hyperlink option appears only if you select the Paste Link option, as Figure 32-6 shows.

Figure 32-6. Word Hyperlink appears as an option in Word’s Paste Special dialog box only if you select the Paste Link option.

After you paste in Word Hyperlink format, every character in the pasted range is underlined like a hyperlink; Ctrl+click any part of it to take you to the source data. The principal disadvantage of using hyperlinks instead of paste-linking is that hyperlinks don’t get updated when the source changes. A hyperlink can make it easy for you or another user to find your way back to the data source, but it provides no assurance that your Word document is faithful to the source.

The Clipboard methods just described are fine for importing existing Excel tables into Word documents. If you’re creating a table from scratch, you have the option of using an alternative method—by clicking the Object command on the Insert tab in Word. When you do this, the Object dialog box appears. On the Create New tab, select Microsoft Excel Worksheet (you might need to scroll down the list a bit), and then click OK. Word displays a window into a blank Excel worksheet, as Figure 32-7 shows.

Here you can create your table by taking advantage of all the formatting and calculation tools in Excel. When your table is ready for inclusion in your Word document, click outside the Excel window. The result is an Excel object embedded in your Word file—exactly what you get if you create the table initially in Excel, copy it to the Clipboard, and then choose Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object from the Paste Special dialog box in Word.

Figure 32-7. When you select Microsoft Excel Worksheet on the Create New tab in the Object dialog box in Word, a window into Excel appears in your Word document.