Like peanut butter and chocolate, a word processing program with some fundamental spreadsheet chops makes a fantastic mix. When you want some rather simple number-crunching embedded in an otherwise ordinary text file, Microsoft Word has you covered, thanks to baked-in performance from its sibling program Excel.

Word’s implementation of Excel spreadsheets essentially embeds a tiny copy of the program, right in the middle of your weekly newsletter to the Booster’s Club. While modifying the Excel area of the document, you have access to all of the Excel manages as if you were utilizing Excel in its own window. You can include basic text and numeral value cells, and most importantly, formulas that apply particularly to the Excel mini-window.

To place an Excel table in Word 2016, click the “Insert” tab at the top of the window, and then click the “Table” button. Click the “Excel Spreadsheet” button in the drop-down menu.

Here’s a fundamental example. I’ve filled the standard cells with made-up values for Stanley’s Sprocket sales, and utilized one of the most common sum formulas for the cells in the last column. So, for the “Yearly Total” worth for “Space Sprockets” in cell F2, I use the formula “amount(B2: E2)” to add all four values across the row and get my total automatically. You can utilize any Excel formula you like in this ingrained variation of the program.

Excel spreadsheets have basically infinite quantities of rows and columns, however that’s not useful when you’re utilizing that data as a table in a Word file. To alter the number of noticeable rows and columns, click and drag the anchor points, the black squares that appear in each corner and midpoint of the box around the Excel spreadsheet.

When you’re done modifying those values, you can click any other part of the Word document and the formatting defaults back to a basic table, ideal for printing or disseminating through read-only formats like PDF. Here, you can change the width and height of the table to better fit the format of the Word document without changing the variety of noticeable columns or rows.

To start modifying the spreadsheet again, double-click anywhere inside it to bring back the Excel controls.

It’s also possible to embed an existing Excel file, which comes in handy if you’re trying to share information you’ve already built up. From the Insert table, click the “Object” button (the small blue-bordered square under the “Text” area):

In the window that appears, click “Create from file,” then click “Browse” to navigate to and open the Excel spreadsheet on your computer system’s storage drive. You likewise have a number of other alternatives here. Picking the “Link To File” option keeps the spreadsheet you see in Word connected to the real Excel spreadsheet, so long as they are kept in the exact same places as when you connected them. Modifications you make in either place are reflected in the other. You can likewise pick the “Display As Icon” choice to show the spreadsheet as a basic icon in the Word document that you can click to open the spreadsheet in Excel.

When you’re done, just click “OK” to place the spreadsheet.

Depending on your Word formatting, you might need to resize or edit it to make everything visible.