I appreciate your feedback; it prompted me to give linking another try.

Today I linked a test Word Doc to a test Excel Sheet and it seemed to work well. I had not realized until I played with it that one could select the .rtf option (under Paste Special) when linking to an Excel sheet and get the data pasted as an easily editable table. Previously I thought I had to link to the Excel object and ended up with a piece of a worksheet embedded in my Word doc which I couldn't format. Then, instead of trying to bookmark the individual cells from the linked table, as you pointed out, I link to the Excel data for the text data I need to insert.

I see your point about templates vs. re-usable documents. I will plan to create a re-usable file with a "constant" name and link it to an Excel sheet which will also have a "constant" name. The real Excel work will be done in a different workbook and then the needed content will be pasted to the Excel source with the constant name. Similarly, after the Word doc has been filled with the needed data, I'll simply copy it to another file and break the links.

Once the links are broken, as far as I can see, they can not be toggled and thus remain invisible to a reader.

Mailmerge is not an option I considered since the data I have to embed would involve several thousand fields, if each cell of a linked table is counted separately. I will keep it in mind for the title page of the document.

Thank you again for your thoughtful advice.