Excel 2010 Table Links in Word 2010 (unbearably slow)

[jhtravis]

Hello Everyone.

I have recently moved from Office 2007 to office 2010. In our office we regularly results from Excel worksheets to our final reports written in Word. At the end of a 40 page report we will have roughly 40 excel links to three individual excel files. These are saved as links since the results are iterative as the report changes based on the design of the project. When I copy this link link in it has begun hanging for 30 seconds. Then when ever I click on the object again it hangs again. Has anyone else experienced this in 2010?

Solutions I've thought of are below
-- Determine a way for the links to be added and automatically set to UpdateMode = OnCall, not Always
-- Move away from links and figure out a way to automatically refresh images held in word.

Do you guys have any other thoughts or solutions?

Thanks!

[macropod]

If you're presenting the data as tables in Word, you may find that you get better performance by creating an embedded worksheet in Word and using the same kind of external workbook referencing that you'd use to refernce data from an external worksheet in Excel. Aside from the performance issues, this also means the format of your table in Word is independent of the Excel workbook's format and you can reference discontiguous ranges from one or more worksheets and/or files for the same table.

[jhtravis]

Does that allow automatic updating of the excel sheet. We update the results of the excel sheet throughout the project. If it is an embedded excel sheet I don't have the control to run the VBA macros do I? That has been the reason we have used links to external xlsm sheets.

[macropod]

You didn't mention anything about macros previously, and you haven't said anything about what they do, so I can't really comment on how their use might be affected.