OLE files can be used to embed objects to data in other documents. OLE technology was developed by Microsoft and many version of the standard were released through the years since its inception. In 1993, Microsoft released second version of OLE specification which was based on COM and DCOM standards.

OLE files are responsible for implementing external data into target document (for example, an Excel spreadsheet). Application that provides the data must support OLE 2.0 standard.