Excel vs Word

Excel and Word: When to Use Each

6-Feb-2006 by Jodie Miners 
Edited/Updated: 23-Oct-2022 by Danielle “Marcy” Dickson 

So many times, I see people using Word when they could get the job done much quicker and easier in Excel, and sometimes it’s the other way around. Here are my tips for when to use each product. 

Use Excel when:

• You are typing in rows and columns with numbers, especially dollar signs, why type in the $’s and the commas and full stops in a number when Excel does it for you automatically.
• If you find yourself using decimal tabs, (or more to the point typing figures without using decimal tabs), it’s probably easier to use Excel, most people don’t know how to use tabs properly.
• If you have any calculations at all, yes Word does do calculations, but do you know how to do them, they are not obvious and easy to use
• If you have rows of text with repeating words in some rows, see my next tip on Excel lists to find out why this is important.  

Use Word when:

• You have paragraphs of text, Excel is not good at creating space before paragraphs (you can do it, but with a macro), so Word is better at this. (What are macros?)
  
• If you want fancy headers or footers, Excel has limited options for headers and footers.
• You have a document with complex layout, e.g., portrait in one page then a table in landscape on the next page, Word Section Breaks work well.
• You have numbers within sentences, then you are going to have to type the dollar signs in any way, so Word is best for this. 

Using Excel and Word Together 

Sometimes you need a table of numbers or dollar amounts when working in a Word document. Here is when you can paste or link the information into Word. You can complete the table in Excel, format it to resemble the Word document, and utilize all of Excel's calculating features to ensure there are no addition errors.

There are various methods for doing this.

• In Excel, select the area/table then copy; in Word, then paste, it pastes the contents as text.
• Or, as above, but use Paste in Word and select the option that aligns to what you are trying to accomplish (Source: Copy from Excel to another Office program):
• Keep Source Formatting. This keeps the data formatting exactly as is.
• Use Destination Styles. This updates the data formatting to match the destination style. If you want to keep the grid lines, this is usually the best way to do it.
• Link & Keep Source Formatting. This keeps the data formatting exactly as is and keeps the data linked to the original worksheet. (If you later decide that you want to unlink the data, you'll need to copy it and paste it again as unlinked data or as a picture.) With the data linked to the original worksheet, the data in the Word document will update when the source Excel worksheet is updated.
• Link & Use Destination Styles. This updates the data formatting to match the destination style and keeps the data linked to the original worksheet. 
• If you later decide that you want to unlink the data, you'll need to copy it and paste it again as unlinked data or as a picture. With the data linked to the original worksheet, the data in the Word document will update when the source Excel worksheet is updated.
• Picture. This pastes the data as a picture. The data cannot be edited or updated.
• Keep Text Only. This pastes the data as text, with each row in a separate paragraph and with tab spaces separating the cell values.

Note: make sure your Excel workbook is saved first, so you can find it easily. This way the cells are editable, but the numbers and text are linked.

Keep in Mind

Pasting an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document doesn’t work very well for a large Excel tables that will span over a page break in Word. For this scenario, I find it easier to keep the Excel table as an addendum in the document that you can insert into the printed or PDF version before sending the document out.