In the window that pops up, click “Create from file,” then click “Browse” to navigate to and open the Excel spreadsheet on your computer’s storage drive. From the Insert table, click the “Object” button (the small blue-bordered square under the “Text” section):
It’s also possible to embed an existing Excel file, which is handy if you’re trying to share data you’ve already accumulated.
To start editing the spreadsheet again, double-click anywhere inside it to bring back the Excel controls. Here, you can adjust the width and height of the table to better fit the formatting of the Word document without changing the number of visible columns or rows. When you’re done editing those values, you can click any other part of the Word document and the formatting defaults back to a basic table, suitable for printing or disseminating via read-only formats like PDF. To change the number of visible rows and columns, click and drag the anchor points, the black squares that appear in each corner and midpoint of the box around the Excel spreadsheet. This is a screenshot of Word, but the menus and controls from Excel appear when editing the embedded spreadsheet.Įxcel spreadsheets have basically infinite amounts of rows and columns, but that’s not practical when you’re using that data as a table in a Word document. You can use any Excel formula you like in this embedded version of the program. So, for the “Yearly Total” value for “Space Sprockets” in cell F2, I use the formula “sum(B2:E2)” to add all four values across the row and get my total automatically. I’ve filled the standard cells with made-up values for Stanley’s Sprocket sales, and used one of the most common sum formulas for the cells in the last column. Click the “Excel Spreadsheet” button in the drop-down menu.
To insert an Excel table in Word 2016, click the “Insert” tab at the top of the window, and then click the “Table” button.