Word And Excel

[Brady Finney]

I have an Excel model that I use to develop financial analyses for
companies. I then write a lengthy report with numbers from the Excel model
input into my report. I would like to find a way to link my Excel model
directly to the MS Word document so that as I update the Excel model, the
report is updated.

I currently manually input the data into bookmarks, but I'm wondering if
anyone has better ideas of how to directly link the model to the report.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Brady
(e-mail address removed)

--
****************************************************************************
Brady T. Finney
Atlantic Management Company, Inc.
Orchard Park - Suite A12
875 Greenland Road
Portsmouth, NH 03801
603-436-8009 (Office)
617-413-4554 (Mobile)
603-427-0146 (Fax)
www.atlantic-mgmt.com

Atlantic Management Company is a leading valuation and financial advisory
firm
serving the business, legal, and financial communities through out New
England
from its offices in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Founded in 1968, the firm's Valuation Group provides business valuations,
fairness
and solvency opinions, and litigation support for private and public
companies. The
Ownership Transition Group specializes in mergers and acquisitions, ESOPs,
and
business succession strategies for privately owned companies and public
companies
desiring to go private.
****************************************************************************

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There are a number of approaches you could use, depending on the complexity
of the workbook, the document, the relationships between them, the extent to
which those relationships change over time, and so on.

If you have never attempted this before...

From your description, it sounds as if you should explore features for
linking that are built into Office programs and other OLE-compliant
programs, e.g. try:
a. Select an area of your workbook
b. Edit|Copy
c. in a blank Word Document, Edit|Paste Special, click the Paste Link
option, choose one of the linking options, and see what happens.
d. go and change one of the cells you selected in Excel (and move the
insertion point to another cell) and see what happens in Word.

If that looks likely to help,
e. Experiment with the formats in step (c)
f. Have a look at Word Edit|Links...
g. Use Alt-F9 to look at the field code that "Paste Special|Insert Link"
inserted into Word, and us the help on Word fields in Word Help to interpret
them. Two recent samples here are:

{ LINK Excel.Sheet.8 "C:\\a\\mix.xls" "Sheet1!R30C1:R33C2" \a \f 4 \r }

R30C1:R33C2 selects rows 30-333, columns 1-2 in "Sheet1" in the workbook.
But you can insert "range names" in a sheet by selecting a range of ceels
and using Insert|Name|Define to define a range called (say) myrange, then
use

{ LINK Excel.Sheet.8 "C:\\a\\mix.xls" "Sheet1!myrange" \a \f 4 \r }

to insert it, where the {} are inserted using ctrl-F9.

Although you can link to various types of information in Excel using
copy/paste special in this way, this approach probably won't help on its own
if you need, for example, to create a new section in Word for every row in a
certain sheet in your workbook, where the number of rows change over time.
In that case, you might need to work out a sensible compromise between
manual effort and automated approaches.

If neither this type of linking, nor the mailmerge style apprroch to
constructing documents from Excel really help, you probably need
a. to pin down your requirement in considerably greater detail
b. use an automation-capable programming language such as VBA and the Word
and Excel object models to achieve your objectives.

Peter Jamieson