Linking an Excel spreadsheet with Word 2016
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at how to bring in Excel documents into your Word document. We'll look at how to bring it through so it's just kind of living in Word. We'll also show you how to connect a text so it updates when Excel updates. We'll also show you how to bring it in just as a pure old image. All right, let's go and do that.
The easiest way to get data from Excel into Word is to copy and paste it. So, in my Excel document here I've got my report, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all the text, and what I'm also going to do is I'm also going to select this bottom row here, this blank white row, just to give it some padding at the bottom, it heaps easier to do this in Excel rather than to try and put spacing in it in Word afterwards, so I'm just going to have an empty blank cell down the bottom. So I'm going to go 'Copy', and I'm going to jump into Word. In Word, this one here is going to go on this page here, 5th page. Where am I going to put it? I'm going to put it just after here, put in a 'return', and I'm going to go to 'Paste'. There are a few different paste options. If I hit 'Paste' it puts it through as this first option here, but there is a bunch of other options, so I'm going to 'undo'.
So, what are my options? The first one here, you can kind of see the preview there, it pastes it straight into Word, there's no connection with Excel, it's kind of separate, we can update it here in Word but there's no connection with the original. So these two first options have no connection to Excel. The first one keeps the formatting, the second one doesn't, you can see, it's kind of a bit of a plain Jane sheep now. So depends on, if somebody's made some nice formatting-- ours has got some nice formatting so I want to keep it. What happens now, if I click on this one here, I get it in, and I can start making amends. First of all I can't see half of it because I got a 2-column, so what I can do is, click up here, click on this kind of target here, and we're going to go to 'Design', no, we're going to go to 'Layout', 'Properties', and we're going to say, "I'd like the text to wrap around". Click 'OK'. It means it’s going to kind of poke it out, and the text is going to run around the outside.
So I've got my chart in here. What I want to do is, on the right hand side here, there’s this little square, and I can drag it just to kind of fit with my document a bit better. I might have to play around with some of these cells here because they don't quite all line up. You can see, you can adjust these quite easily here in Word.
Now what happens is, if I make changes here in Word, they don't change the Excel document, so I can kind of get in here and change the formatting, and play around with this thing now in Word. This is my preferred way of working. The other way of working is, if I delete this guy here, and we put in these options, this is quite cool, it looks the same except that-- it looks like you can change it, watch this, I can go through and change this to 151, but what happens is if I go and say save this one, and I jump into Excel document, and I go and change this, say that data changes here to 130, and I hit 'Save', and I jump back here into Word, it doesn’t update automatically, but if I close it, save it, and try and reopen it, you get this thing. This annoys the hell out of me.
It's cool, because it means that it's updating-- if I click 'Yes', it means it's going to go through, override anything I did in Word, and it's going to use that Excel data. You can see 130 here, and you might love that, you might think that is a great idea. Often, it is a great idea but so many times that Excel sheet gets lost, and you can't find its data, or somebody updates it for the next version, forgets to change the file name, sometimes it just gets lost on the server, you sent somebody the Word document, and you forget to send them the Excel document. In my opinion, I like to just link it in Word, and if I need to update it, I just go and copy paste it, and update it, it's not a big deal. But yes, you might like it the other way.
The last option that we’ll look at-- I’m going to select this one, this one's quite cool as well. So I'm going to go back to Excel, I'm going to copy it all. Copying. And in here, in my document, I'm going to put in paste as the last option here at the end, which is ‘Picture’. There is one more option, it says ‘Just Keep Text Only'. The text only option is a terrible option, you can see, it gets rid of all the formatting, and just becomes this big kind of jumble of text. So there's one here that becomes a picture, and that's quite cool because it might be nicer to use a picture of this, so watch this, I can scale it up, and I can do the same thing with 'Text Wrap', I can say I’d like to wrap it around, and it can just be a nice big image that goes across. It doesn't update, you can't change it, it's just a graphic.
So that is how to bring in an Excel document and either paste it straight into Word using image, or link to the Excel document directly.
All right, let's check out the next tutorial.