Part 7: Integrating Excel with Other Applications in Visual C#.NET

Drawer QR Code ISO/IEC18004 in Visual C#.NET Part 7: Integrating Excel with Other Applications

You can paste-link any of the formats shown in Figure 23-3 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 on your Word document. You can see the code by choosing Tools, Options in Word, clicking the View tab, and selecting the Field Codes check box. Links from Excel into Word are automatic by default, which means that any time the Excel source is changed, the Word document is automatically adjusted. You can switch to manual linking by choosing Edit, Links, selecting the linked item, and selecting the Manual Update option in Word. In the Links dialog box, as shown in Figure 23-5, you can also click Break Link to disassociate the Word data from its Excel source, or Change Source to point the link to different data.

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.

It is extremely important that you make sure Word identifies the source of an Excel link by means of a range name, not by an ordinary range reference. Otherwise, if the source table changes location for any reason (for example, if someone inserts or deletes a few rows), the link will no longer reference the original table. For information about naming ranges, see Defining and Managing Names on page 370. 595

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Figure 23-5. In Word s Links dialog box, you can switch between manual and automatic updating, modify the link specification, or break the link.

Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Inside Out If the worksheet range has a name at the time you copy it to the Clipboard, Word will reference it by name when you perform your paste-link. If it is not named, Word will reference it by cell address, using R1C1 notation. If you subsequently assign a name to the range in Excel and perform a manual update, Word will continue to reference it by address, not by name. To fix the reference by hand, do the following.

You ll see a dialog box similar to the one shown in Figure 23-5, and in the Item column for your link, you ll find the R1C1 address of the source table.

5 Select the name of the file in which your table resides, and click Open. 6 Back in the Links dialog box, click OK, and your link will henceforth know its name.

An alternative way to create a link between a Word document and an Excel document is to use hyperlinks. With an Excel range on the Clipboard, you can choose Edit, Paste As Hyperlink in Word. As Figure 23-6 shows, each cell in the copied range becomes a separate, individual hyperlink. Each hyperlink points to the upper left corner cell (not necessarily the active cell) in the copied range. Formats are preserved (but each cell gets a hyperlink underline unless you change the way Word normally displays hyperlinks); graphical elements are omitted from the copy.

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Figure 23-6. Hyperlinks can connect a Word document to an Excel document, but they are not updated when the source changes.

The principal disadvantage of using hyperlinks instead of OLE links (that is, 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.