An executive summary in a Word document frequently consists of a financial snapshot of data contained in an Excel spreadsheet, i.e. "Our forecasted revenue for 2006 is $2200 a change of -15% compared to the previous year."  That entire sentence was automatically composed from text and numbers concatenated in an Excel spreadsheet, and then linked to a Word document.  The sentence is generic, but the variable financial data (numeric) is automatically updated as the spreadsheet changes.  The spreadsheet data is shown below.

The basic form of the function is CONCATENATE(text1, text2, text3...) which combines text, numbers or cell references into a single text string.  The actual formula used in the spreadsheet above that produces the Result is: =CONCATENATE(Text_1, " $", Num_1, " ", Text_2, " ", Num_2, "% ", Text_3). The spaces between phrases, dollar sign and percent sign were added to create a cohesive sentence.

Using boiler plate text and grabbing data from your spreadsheet can save you time and reduce typing errors while automatically updating your reports.