Linking Excel Graphs and Tables into Word Doc

[Rosemary E]

I have a board report saved in MS Word 2007,which we update with new information every two months. What we do is save the file as a .pdf after each meeting and then for the next board meeting we simply update the original. We never change the location or the filename. This word doc contains about 20 links to various cell ranges and graphs stored in an Excel spreadsheet that has loads of tables of financial and production data from all the departments in the company. We never change the filename or location of this file either. So in theory the links should all be intact at all time. For the first few months after I set this up it worked really well but for at least a year now it comes up as not being able to find the links or if you right click on the linked object to open the link, it indicates that it is not linked at all!

Recently it is also giving us a message telling us that the MS Excel file is already open and we have to click past one of these messages for every link except for the first one. It's as if it is picking up on the fact that Word opened the excel file when it encountered the first link to the Excel file and after that it feels the need to let us know that the file is already open every time it encounters another link to that file. It didn't use to do this.

Also we often find that after someone has finished using the word file and saved and closed, the linked excel file doesn't get closed properly. So if another person tries to simply open the Excel file to enter their department's data they can't because the file is opened by another user. I have to log on as administrator and find the open session on the file and close it. It is as if word isn't closing the excel file when it closes the word file. This is all really frustrating because we should be able to just update the excel file and then open the word file, click yes to Update Links and have all the current data in the document. Does anyone else have these problems or know how to prevent them?

[macropod]

Hi Rosemary,

I'd suggest repairing the Office installations on the affected PCs. In Word 2007 you can do this via Word Options|Resources|Diagnose. This should repair faults in all Office applications, not just Word.