Microsoft Excel - Using Other Windows Applications

Using Other Windows Applications

Windows applications such as Microsoft Access and Microsoft Word, as well as Excel as can communicate with each other and use each other's capabilities. The most common are Dynamic Data Exchange: although strongly deprecated by Microsoft, this is a common method to send data between applications running on Windows, with official MS publications referring to it as "the protocol from hell". As the name suggests, it allows applications to supply data to others for calculation and display. It is very common in financial markets, being used to connect to important financial data services such as Bloomberg and Reuters.

OLE Object Linking and Embedding: allows a Windows application to control another to enable it to format or calculate data. This may take on the form of "embedding" where an application uses another to handle a task that it is more suited to, for example a Powerpoint presentation may be embedded in an Excel spreadsheet or vice versa.