Object Linking and Embedding - Overview

Overview

OLE allows an editing application to export part of a document to another editing application and then import it with additional content. For example, a desktop publishing system might send some text to a word processor or a picture to a bitmap editor using OLE. The main benefit of OLE is to add different kinds of data to a document from different applications, like a text editor and an image editor. This creates a compound document and a master file to which the document references. Changes to data in the master file immediately affects the document that references it. This is called "linking" (instead of "embedding").

Its primary use is for managing compound documents, but it is also used for transferring data between different applications using drag and drop and clipboard operations. The concept of "embedding" is central to the inclusion of multimedia in Web pages, such as video, animation (including Flash animations), and audio files within the hypertext markup language (such as HTML or XHTML) or other structural markup language used (such as XML or SGML). Modern browsers may use different embedding mechanisms than OLE.