One department of our company has a lengthy status report that is horribly
formatted as a Microsoft Word table. It has been set up to be almost
impossible tousefully convert to any other format or to import data from: It
has inconsistently merged cells, variable kinds of data in single cells, etc.

If I embed the thing in Excel as a Word object, such that the other
department can continue to update it like they always have, is it possible to
connect Excel cells to cells in this table? I really don't think so, but I
thought I'd ask. I've rebuilt the Word report in Excel, trying to mimic the
look and usability of the thing as closely as possible, but the other
department's users refuse to engage with Excel at all. I'm desperate to be
able to pull at least some data from this thing without having to manually
copy and paste, especially since it's a huge report and updates weekly.

Help!