Working with Microsoft Excel

You can import your Microsoft Excel workbooks into an Origin workbook or you can open your Excel workbooks in Origin as Excel workbooks.

• When you import your Excel workbook into an Origin workbook, you have full access to Origin's powerful graphing and analysis features.
• When you open your Excel workbook as an Excel workbook, you are actually running an OLE instance of Excel inside of the Origin workspace. In this case, you have access to Excel's menus and features, but access to Origin's graphing and analysis features is limited.

"Opening" vs "Importing" of MS Excel Files

When deciding whether to open or import, consider these things:

• If you are sharing a common Excel file with colleagues -- especially non-Origin users -- you may wish to open the Excel workbook file. In such cases, you could have full read-write access to your Excel data file and continue to save modifications to an external file. If you link your Origin project file to the externally-saved Excel workbook file, then you can and your colleagues can update the Excel file as needed and dependent graphs, etc. in the Origin project file will be updated when you reopen the Origin project file.
• If you need full access to all of Origin's graphing and analysis tools, you will probably want to import your Excel data, as you have limited access to Origin's features when running Excel inside of Origin.

For more information, see Opening vs Importing of Microsoft Excel.

Additional things to know

• To open an Excel file in Origin, you must have Microsoft Excel 8 (Office 97) or later installed on your computer, either as a local or network copy, and the file has to be an *.xls(saved as a Microsoft Excel 97-2003 workbook) or *.xlsx(saved as a Microsoft Excel 2007 workbook) file.
• To import an Excel file into Origin, the file needs to have been saved as a Microsoft Excel 97-2003 workbook(*.xls), a Microsoft Excel 2007 workbook(*.xlsx), or a Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook (*.xlsm).
• You may not be able to open an Origin project file if the file contains Excel workbook links or internally saved Excel data that were created on a computer running a newer version of Excel. This is a standard, backward compatibility issue.
• Origin does not support dynamically linking a formula in an Excel workbook to source data in another Excel workbook.