Chapter 5: Copying, Moving, and Sharing Information Between Programs

Chapter Introduction

Windows XP provides two methods of sharing data between different application programs (although each method has variations): You can cut or copy and then paste using the Windows Clipboard, or you can use OLE, object linking and embedding. In general, cutting-and-pasting (or its variant, drag-and-drop) works well for the simpler tasks--moving text from one application to another, for instance. OLE is useful when you want all the features of one type of program to work with an object in another program. For example, if you want to display an Excel spreadsheet in a Word document, and you want to be able to update a complicated formula and display the correct answer in the Word document, then you need to use OLE.