This reminds me somewhat of OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ... [1]. You can paste an Excel chart into a Word document and if you update the data in Excel, the chart in Word will update. You can edit the chart in Word using the Excel UI because you are essentially running an Excel instance inside of Word. You can interact with Excel through an API, no need for a human. But it is painful, you can probably imagine the kind of API you need in order to be able to do all the things you can do with the Excel UI.

The idea is amazing, making this work consistently requires effort, and a lot of it. And as only a few applications invested this effort, it only works with a few applications and never really took off outside of Microsoft. I think this used to work with WordPad and maybe even Notepad but it no longer does, you just get an image instead of the chart object in WordPad and nothing at all in Notepad. It is a dying technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

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tclancy 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

At least there's no history of security issues with that.

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danscan an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you may have meant to comment on another post :)

	▲	danbruc an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No, correct post. But maybe I am misunderstanding the idea behind the post, that is certainly possible.