Does anyone know of a pre-packaged solution for referencing Excel cells directly in a Word document?
For example,
{[TestExcel]Tab1!A1}
Dear Mr. {[TestExcel]Tab1!A2},
Our systems have alerted us that your account {TestExcel]Tab1!AccountNumber} is overdue. Please remit payment of {TestExcel]Tab1!PaymentDue} immediately.
This example uses a hypothetical { } syntax, where the contents are standard Excel formula.
Every solution I've seen uses custom VBA to accomplish this. It seems like an extremely common need for which there should be some good 3rd party software available that lets non-technical users accomplish this task.
As indicated in the example above both named ranges and standard cell references would need to be supported.
Yes.
Step 1: Copy the excel cell.
Step 2: Go to your word document where you want to paste the reference.
Step 3: Right click
Step 4: Under paste options, select "link with source formatting" or "link and merge formatting".
I tried @Green Demon's method, but the two Paste Options listed were not present for me (Office 2013). I only had Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting, and Keep Text Only. However, I poked around and found the Paste Special, which was hidden on the Ribbon
The instructions are as follows:
- Copy the Excel range.
- Go to your Word document, and left click where you want to paste the Excel range.
- Click on Paste Special from the Ribbon as shown below, or type Ctrl+Alt+V.
- Click on the Paste link radio button.
- Click on Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object. The Paste Special dialog box should look something like this:
- Click OK.
The range should now be pasted in your document, and if you save, close, and re-open the Word document, you will be prompted about whether or not you want to "update this document with the data from the linked files," which works the same way as it does if you're doing Excel-to-Excel linking.
This feature is fantastic, and I'm so happy to have found it today. However, in my brief experience using it, having these Word-to-Excel links dramatically increases the amount of time it takes to open your Word document, even before it prompts you about updating. After that, the act of updating the Excel links takes much longer than it would if you were doing the same linking Excel-to-Excel. All of my work is done on network-share files, so YMMV.
alt+h+v+l works too. If you're building big documents clicking the ribbon every time gets murderous after a while.