One of the most powerful features of the Microsoft Office suite is Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). If you copy a complex pie chart or a massive data table from Microsoft Excel and paste it into a Microsoft Word document using the “Link Data” option, the two files become tethered. By default, every time you open the Word document, it will secretly reach out to the Excel file, pull the latest data, and automatically update the chart on your page.
While this is incredible for generating live monthly reports, it is a disaster for archival documentation or historical records. If you finalize a Q1 Financial Report in Word, but then update the source Excel file for Q2, opening the old Word document will automatically overwrite the historical Q1 chart with the new Q2 data. Furthermore, automatic updating can cause Word to completely freeze for several minutes on startup if the linked Excel file is stored on a slow network drive.
You can dive into Word’s advanced settings to sever this automated polling behavior, forcing the linked charts to remain static until you explicitly command them to refresh.
How to Stop Automatic Link Updating in Word
You must disable the global automatic link refresh setting within Word’s Advanced Options.
- Open your document in Microsoft Word.
- Click on File in the top-left corner of the ribbon.
- Click on Options at the bottom of the left sidebar.
- In the Word Options window, select Advanced from the left-hand navigation pane.
- Scroll all the way down the right pane until you reach the General section near the bottom.
- Locate the checkbox labeled Update automatic links at open.
- Uncheck this box.
- Click OK to save your changes.
Microsoft Word will no longer blindly poll your Excel files when you open a document. Your charts and tables will remain perfectly frozen in time, displaying the exact data they held when you last saved the file. If you ever want to update a chart with new data, you can simply right-click the chart and manually select “Update Link.”