Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 18: the graphics programs of office x 659

Once you’ve highlighted a portion of the picture in this way, you can cut out the

selection, removing your ex from the picture forever, for example. You can also

apply certain effects to that portion of the picture inside or outside the lasso,

applying a dry brush effect to the background while leaving the people inside the

lasso clear.

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)

Linked and embedded objects are both chunks of data, like drawings or spreadsheets,

nestled within a document in one Office program but actually created by another.

You edit them in whatever program created them, but behind the scenes, there’s a

big difference in where their data is stored. A linked object’s data is stored in a sepa-

rate file (what Microsoft calls the source file). An embedded object, on the other

hand, is an integral part of the file in which it appears. All its data is stored right

there in the document. That’s why an embedded object bloats the file size of the

document that contains it. However, embedding an object means that you’ll never

have to endure that sickening jolt when you realize you’re missing an important

speech that you copied to your laptop (as you might if you had only used linking).

The whole process is called Object Linking and Embedding, or OLE for short. You

can’t get very far on a Microsoft newsgroup or discussion board without seeing that

acronym. At user group meetings, the preferred pronunciation is olé.

Helper Programs: Chart, Equation Editor, and Graph

Office comes with several helper programs, each of which

is dedicated to one specific task: organization charts, equa-

tions, and graphs.

You’re not meant to open these programs by double-click-

ing them, as you would a normal Mac program. In fact,

Equation Editor doesn’t even have a Save command, and

Microsoft Graph can’t be launched by a double-click. In-

stead, you open one of these helper programs from within

another Office application. For example, if you’re working

in Word or PowerPoint, and you want to embed a graph

(but you don’t want to go through the hassle of opening

Excel to do the job), simply choose Insert→Object.

Office presents you with a list of the possible object types

that Word can insert. Double-click the one you want, such

as Microsoft Graph. Now Microsoft Graph opens, and Office

puts a placeholder graphic in your Word document (it

shows where the graph will appear when you quit Graph).

Once your graph is finished, close Microsoft Graph; the

graph that you created appears automatically at the point

that you chose—no copy and paste necessary. (In fact, the

chart or equation appears there even if you close the helper

program’s window without saving changes! Choosing

Edit→Undo is the quickest way to delete the aborted im-

age from your document.)

If you’ve already created an equation, graph, or chart us-

ing one of these applications, you can edit it by double-

clicking the object. The appropriate helper program opens

automatically.

UP TO SPEED

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