OLE Links incompatible with DOCX format?? Help...

Doug_Robbins_Word_MVP Thank you for looking into this on your computer. It's a mystery to me why the DOCX takes 2-3 minutes to open on my computer as it seems to check excel for all 550 OLE links in the document as it opens while the DOC does not do that. I'm surprised it didn't have the same behavior on your machine.

I'm interested in your idea about using document variables instead of OLE links - I haven't used that functionality. However, I have some questions about how it could work -

--Many of our OLE links are not for single cells of text - they are for ranges that are shown in the Word as Microsoft Excel objects with the excel formatting - I'm guessing the document variables would not work for those types of links?

--These templates are not static documents. The employees in my office are regularly creating new content in the workbook (both individual cells and ranges in excel) on any of 10 or 15 worksheets which need to be quickly linked in their word document. With the OLE links all they have to do is copy the cell or range in Excel to the clipboard and then "paste special" as a link (unformatted or as an excel object) in Word. I'm guessing the method you suggest with document variables might not be as flexible?