Microsoft’s popular Office suite of productivity software ships with a variety of applications that are designed to work seamlessly with one another. However, few users of the software are aware just how seamless applications in the suite can be when it comes to incorporating elements of one software title into another.

Powerful enough for commercial use and yet practical enough for the home, Word and Excel are the two most popular applications in the MS Office suite. One useful feature is the ability to display a chart in a Word document that was created in Excel.

With Office’s integration of cross-application elements, you can create a chart in Word without having to create or maintain a separate Excel file to store the data and the chart.
Advantages of Creating a Chart within Word

There are two major advantages to creating a chart directly in Word. First, you won’t have to create or maintain multiple files to create one Word document. This means you can reduce the amount of storage space it takes to create professional looking projects.

Second, creating the chart in Word boosts your productivity since it takes less time to manipulate one document than two. In addition, you won’t have to manually import the chart from Excel to Word and spend time modifying it to make it fit on the page; Word does all of this for you.
Create a Chart in Word

To insert a chart directly into Word, start by positioning the cursor at the location where you want your chart. On the Ribbon, click on the Insert tab and then on the Chart button.

Word will immediately open up a window allowing you to select the exact type of chart you want to insert into your document. Notice that you can create the exact same charts in Word as you can in Excel. The reason why will become apparent in the next step. For this example, we will insert a simple bar chart. Click on the Simple Bar Chart icon and then click the OK button.

When you clicked the OK button, Word did two things. First, it opened an Excel file that contains some sample data. Second, it placed a temporary chart into your Word document that displays the information from the generic data.

The programs are side by side so that you can make changes to the data in Excel and see the results of those changes immediately in the chart. Change the data in Excel to match the image below:

.Notice that each time you edit a cell in the Excel file, Word updates the chart to include your changes. Essentially, Word lets you see in real time how your chart looks as you make changes in the Excel data.

When you are finished editing the chart data, close the Excel file and the chart will remain in Word. You can edit the chart at any time by right clicking on the chart and choosing Edit Data from the menu. When you do, Excel will open again so you can make the changes you want.

Notice that by using this method of inserting a chart into Word, there is no need to save an external Excel file, create the chart from scratch, or manually import the chart into Word. Word takes care of everything for you to make inserting charts into Word simple and efficient.