You watch the second keynote from the PDC conference, you will then actually understand what they're doing with office... and I think you'll be pleasantly pleased and surprised.
As a daily MS Office programmer myself, I know what you're saying although it is possible to do what you're asking for... you just need to use 3rd tools.
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When is Office (and all the wannabees) going to become integrated, allowing Excel-like tables anywhere in a document, with formulae being able to reference any named object in the document. Then there can be many presentation 'views' that slice the information by rule (perhaps based upon tags/styles like HTML's multiple class attributes).
I do a lot of Office programming using the apps as building blocks and it still seems stupid to have such artificial functional boundaries between the different apps. And OLE does not do it!