It has bugged me for years that no major office suite does this so I figured I should suggest it. Imagine a calc document (I'm picking calc because it's already a multi-sheet format), where some sheets, as now, are spreadsheets, but others are writer documents, or impress presentations. What I'm looking to do is create a spreadsheet to centralise and calculate numeric data, and then use that data in a Writer document, without having to manage multiple documents separately, and to make the links to the data simpler to configure and keep up to date. A trivial example: sheet 1 might have my day and mileage rates, product prices, etc, sheet 2 would be a Writer document into which the various rates are inserted inline into the text ("site visits charged at £xxx plus £x.xx/mile travel costs"). When I turn the document into a PDF or print it, only the writer sheet is included. But this extends towards far more complex documents which reference data, including reports etc. Often this can be done badly by putting text and images into a spreadsheet (="site visits charged at £"&$Sheet1.C5&" plus £"&$Sheet1.C6&"/mile travel costs"), but imagine trying to put the two numbers in bold or a different colour, and you see how limiting this is. Given that the functionality is already contained in one executable it doesn't even feel that hard to do (relative to the benefit it creates), and that over the years I have seen countless Excel/Calc documents which have tried to do this sort of thing with the existing functionality and you can see how much work obviously went into achieving pretty poor results, I am surprised this has never been done by Excel or Calc, maybe someone can tell me. The only significant issue I can see is that Excel doesn't do it - is that alone a reason for Calc not to do it?
> no major office suite does this True; but one did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_shared_tools#Binder > Microsoft Binder was an application originally included with Microsoft Office 95, 97, and 2000 that allowed users to include different types of OLE 2.0 objects (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, presentations and projects) in one file. ... it was not widely used, and was discontinued after Office 2000. The idea comes from time to time, but it would not be possible to cover every user need with such an application; one would definitely want to have an AutoCAD "sheet" as yet another tab, then Adobe Photoshop file, etc. MS hoped to use its OLE technology as something that was expected to appear on every application on Windows, so potentially allowing to have just anything inside a Binder document; and they failed. For LibreOffice, this would be a failure before we started. And the proper way exists: use file system directories to manage different types of documents, without restrictions. WF IMO.
To be clear, I'm explicitly trying to avoid embedding documents, I'm talking entirely about existing data structures directly supported by the soffice application. Whilst I can see merit in container formats and other solutions, and they may solve the same problem in a different way, that's not what I'm suggesting. (Embedding a writer object on a calc sheet, not so much replacing the calc sheet but covering it up, would be a clunky and non intuitive way to do this, if only the embedded document has access to data from the container, which I don't believe it does?) The idea here is that LO allows a calc sheet to *be* a writer document, not that it can *contain* one. It therefore only makes sense to talk about document formats that LO can create and edit natively, and even then it might not make sense (or be feasible) to include LO components which don't really handle data (eg Draw). (TBH I only mentioned Impress because it sounded like a good idea, but it's a tool I don't personally have experience of - can presentations currently link to external data? If not then it wouldn't make any more sense than Draw in this context.) As to the proper way to handle it: which email applications natively support emailing directories? What's the best way to put a directory on a website to download? In all cases you're requiring an intermediate container (eg .zip) and expecting the recipient to manage the contents. You're also creating fragile documents that break when a file is renamed, etc. Moreover, what is the "correct" way to write a document that references the same number multiple times, and also numbers dericee from it? Who hasn't, for example, sent a document where you mention a value in one paragraph that doesn't match the same value referenced later? User defined fields help, until you need calculations, and even then they're not easy to use and familiar to most users in the way that a spreadsheet is.
*derived, I have no idea what dericee is!
LibreOffice is already a huge all-in-one suite, don't need to do it more difficult Agreed with Mike Closed as WontFix
If I remember correctly, in the 1990s Lotus Symphony did, but it was discontinued.