OLE

O bject L inking and E mbedding standards established by Microsoft Corporation for Mac and Windows operating systems. In 1997, Microsoft declared that OLE no longer stands for object linking and embedding (see ActiveX and CORBA ). Before 1997, however, OLE standards allowed the creation of links between documents and the embedding of documents in multiple applications. The OLE standards are designed to be "dynamic" in that as changes are made in an object in one document, the changes are simultaneously made automatically in all linked documents. For example, in pasting from the clipboard, authors choose the Paste Link or Paste Special command rather than the Paste command in the Edit menu. Pasting in this way creates a dynamic link between the source document and the destination document. OLE also supports embedding which embeds the source document (or a portion of the document) into the destination file such that the two documents become a "compound" file. Embedding is often used where a server file (creating embedded items) and client files (receiving embedded files) are in the system. In contrast to OLE linkages, OLE embedding edits in client files will not alter server files. This is not the case with OLE linkages, where any changes in a linked file will change all other linked files. Most word processor and spreadsheet software options have OLE capabilities. (See ActiveX , CORBA , and Java )