Carroly is right if you foolishly let each application fight for ownership of your file types, but if you know how to manage your file types, OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) works just fine except on a few products that were designed for Macintosh and ported to Windows such as Bryce, Photoshop and especially those very aggressive MacAbominations called QuickTime and Stuffit. If you just keep these last two things off your Windows system, most things will work fine (except for Photoshop and Bryce which are still worth the aggravation).