Object linking and embedding

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) is a Microsoft technology.

A distributed object system and protocol from Microsoft, also used on the Acorn Archimedes. OLE allows an editor to "farm out" part of a document to another editor and then reimport it. For example, a desktop publishing system might send some text to a word processor or a picture to a bitmap editor using OLE.

It was initially used primarily for copying and pasting data between different applications, especially using drag and drop, as well as for managing compound documents. It later evolved to become an architecture for software components known as the component object model (COM), and later DCOM.