While Microsoft Word is often thought of as a text editor, it is much more than that. Word users can add pictures and videos, perform a lot of formatting, and generally customize their documents in a variety of ways. One way that you can achieve this customization is by including a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet directly within the document itself. This will display the contents of that spreadsheet in the document so that document readers can view the data in that file if it's important to the document. I'll discuss two ways to do this in my discussion.
Steps to be followed
The steps in this article were performed in Microsoft Word 2016 but hopefully will also work in other versions of word. This guide assumes you already have an Excel file that you wish to insert into Word.
1. Open the Word document into which you wish to add the Excel file.
2. Click at the point inside the document where you want to add the Excel file.
3. Click Insert at the top of the window.
4. Select the Object button in the Text section of the ribbon, then choose Object from the dropdown menu.
5. Select the Create from File tab at the top of the window.
6. Click the Browse button.
7. Browse to the Excel file, select it, and then click OK.
8. Click OK at the bottom of the window to insert the file.
NOTE:
If you wish to make any changes to the data in the Excel file you can right-click the Excel object in the document, choose Worksheet Object, then click on edit.
Inserting an Excel Worksheet as an Embedded Object
If you want to be able to use Excel functions and other Excel formatting features later to update the table, you're better off pasting the Excel data as an embedded object.
Steps:
1. Select the section of the Excel worksheet that you want to copy and press Ctrl + C or right-click and copy.
2. In Microsoft Word, place the cursor where you want to insert the data table.
3. In the Home menu, select the down arrow under Paste and select Paste Special.
4. You'll see a Paste Special dialogue box appear. Select Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object and select OK.
- This will insert the copied cells into your Word document. The new object won't behave like a Microsoft Word table at all, and you won't be able to edit the data inside the table from inside Microsoft Word.
Changes made take effect in Word even if you haven't saved the changes in the Excel file. This essentially lets you create a live view from Word into changes someone is actively making in any Excel file. As seen above, there are multiple ways to insert an Excel worksheet into a Word document. The option you choose only depends on how you intend to use that data and whether you want to see or use data changes in the original Excel file.