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OLE Structured Storage

Tutorial Key Facts
Supported Operating SystemWindows XP, Vista, Server 2003, Win 7 (all versions)
Office 2003 Only
Glue VersionNot Available
Last Update2012/11/11
AuthorNihad Hassan

Learn how to hide MS Word file inside MS Excel file or vise versa

According to Wikipedia OLE Structured Storage is:

COM Structured Storage (variously also known as COM structured storage or OLE structured storage) is a technology developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows operating system for storing hierarchical data within a single file. Structured storage is widely used in Microsoft Office applications

Using this technology we can hide one word document inside an excel document or vice versa , we can perform this using a free tool called merge stream from the following website http://www.ntkernel.com  and it support the following windows OS Windows 9x, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP

Install the tool, select two files , one MS Word and another MS Excel and finally click the “Merge” Button as follow

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After clicking the “Merge” button, if everything is OK the following success message will appears

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Now both documents will be merged into a single file.

[important]Please note MS office documents in 2007 format and more are not supported, only documents end with .doc for word and xls for Excel is accepted[/important]

Now in order to open the excel file we need to rename the extension of the word file to .xls because the excel file is now hidden inside the word document, we can reverse the case if we want either.

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Change the file extension to .xls to open the file in Excel as follow4

 

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