OK, if I have a spreadsheet in Excel, now do I convert it to a Word table?

More to the point (for the real mavens) if I have an Open Office spreadsheet, how do I convert it to an Open Office Write table?

[Friday morning update]

OK, I ended up "pasting special" into Open Office Writer as an Excel spreadsheet. Duh. And thanks for all the tips.

In the words of the master: "Very carefully."

What happens if you select the cells in the spreadsheet, hit "copy", then "paste" in the Word document? Seems like that ought to do something useful.

It doesn't do what I want (i.e., paste them into a Word table).

Try "Edit >> Paste Special"
Then choose to paste as HTML.

Worked for me

Note: my above suggestion is for OpenOffice Text, not Word.

Copy the table from the Speadsheet, Paste Special (assuming that is the same in OO) and then you'll have to reformat.

Alternatively, again, I don't know OO all that well, you could paste it normally as an embedded sheet and it ought to work with formatting. At least it does in MS Office.

If regular copy-and-paste doesn't do it for me, usually because some kind of formatting I didn't want came along for the ride, I sometimes resort to copying from Excel into Notepad (where the columns will be delimited as tabs), and then recopy the Notepad document into Word, and then in Word do a convert-text-to-table.

Supposing the table is rather simple, the task is simple. Select the Excel cells and copy them. Say you have a 5x12 grid.

In Word, insert a 5x12 table. Highlight the whole table. Edit, Paste Cells.

At least, it works that way for me on my Mac with Office 2004.

you can also insert a sheet directly from an existing excel file, and even "live link" to it so that the data is shown in the word doc but kept in excel file.

and now comes the most useless part as all the useful things have been said. while openoffice is nice, real men use Google Spreasheets :)