"Top Spin" wrote...
I am posting this here because Excel users seem to do more linking.
I'm having trouble getting this answered in the Word NGs.

I am looking for a way to embed individual Visio graphic objects in a
Word document in such a way that only a link is actually stored in
Word -- not the entire graphic object.

I am writing a large tutorial that includes hundreds of graphics -- as
many as 7-8/page. Some pages are 90% graphic images with just a few
lines of text. I am creating the graphics in Visio. I started out just
using cut and paste to paste the actual graphic objects into the Word
document. This causes the Word document to get very large (8MB and
growing). It takes forever to load and save.
....

One thing Microsoft does *worse* than every other software maker is design
file formats. Just tested: Word can handle linked Excel drawings as file
links, storing only a link to the Excel file; but Word doesn't seem to be
able to handle linked bitmaps as file links, it seems they're always
embedded. If Visio objects are treated as bitmaps, maybe that's the
explanation.

FWIW, OpenOffice Writer handles every sort of file/object type I've thrown
at it as file links, including bitmap files. It may be the case you'd be
better off using OpenOffice (or anything other than Word) to produce the
manual you're writing. While there may be some combination of Web and
General options in the Save As dialog that would prevent bitmaps from being
embedded, it's a dead certainty OpenOffice Writer's default behavior is
better than Word's.