Blocked From Inserting PDF Files In Office Documents?

Sometimes it is handy to insert a PDF file inside of an Office document just so everything is in one place. You may have received a quote from a vendor and you are working on the analysis of it in Excel. Just put the PDF file inside the Excel document and you never have to worry about losing it. It is easy enough in all versions of Excel. Word, PowerPoint and other Office apps should have similar functionality.

In Excel 2007 and 2010, go to the Insert tab, select "Object" way to the right. You want to create from a file. Point to the PDF file that was emailed to you or that you created from a scan of a physical piece of paper. Once you select the document, before you hit OK, it is usually a good idea to "display as icon." It won't save space in the file, but it makes it real obvious you should double-click to open it. If you don't, Excel will show you the entire first page and it is not at all obvious that double-clicking will open a multi-page document.

The method for doing this in Office 2000-2003 is similar, but you'll have to dig around on the toolbar and menus for the Object option.

The problem is now though, if you have installed Adobe Reader X, you may get this error message.

"Cannot Insert Object" error in Excel

To fix this, you need to disable one of the security features of Adobe Reader X. Open Reader, go to Edit|Preferences and on the General setting, way at the bottom is a new setting labeled "Enable Protected Mode at Startup."

Uncheck this, close Reader, and retry the insertion in Excel. It should work.

The risk is, of course, now that you have disabled a new security feature in Adobe Reader X, you are more susceptible to an attack from a malicous PDF file you open on the web. I recommend that once you have inserted the object, go back into Adobe Reader X and re-enable the setting.