I just ran into this problem 7 years after this answer was posted and I found that there is in fact another workable solution in addition to the 3 suggested by Paul in the case of embedded XLS files (instead of XLSX (or PPT/PPTX etc).

The document I was working on had 54 embedded XLS files and there was no way I could get the client to redo everything with XLSX. So I had to find another solution.

What most people don't know is that DOCX files are essentially ZIP archives containing a bunch of other files. In fact if you use a program like 7-ZIP you can "open" the DOCX archive just like any other ZIP archive and see the documents contained within.

Once opened, in the word/embeddings folder you will find all the embedded files that you can extract, just like any other ZIP archive. So all you need to do is extract these files to some folder on your computer and then add them to Trados for translation (XLS, PPT whatever).

Once translated, export the translations to their original XLS format MAINTAINING THE SAME NAMES. Then go back to the DOCX archive, delete the original files in the word/embeddings folder and copy the new translations in their place.

At this point the work is essentially done, but you'll have to take one more step to "finalize" things. To simplify the reading of the Word document, what you see in the document as you read it is not the original embedded file but rather a snapshot bitmap image of the XLS file. This means that if you open the translated Word document you will still see images of the original embedded XLS files. So to finish things you should reopen the Word document and click or double click on each embedded file which will force Word to load the translated external XLS file then simply click outside the embedded file to force Word to generate a new bitmap image based on the translated content.

That's it, you're done.

I just ran into this problem 7 years after this answer was posted and I found that there is in fact another workable solution in addition to the 3 suggested by Paul in the case of embedded XLS files (instead of XLSX (or PPT/PPTX etc).

The document I was working on had 54 embedded XLS files and there was no way I could get the client to redo everything with XLSX. So I had to find another solution.

What most people don't know is that DOCX files are essentially ZIP archives containing a bunch of other files. In fact if you use a program like 7-ZIP you can "open" the DOCX archive just like any other ZIP archive and see the documents contained within.

Once opened, in the word/embeddings folder you will find all the embedded files that you can extract, just like any other ZIP archive. So all you need to do is extract these files to some folder on your computer and then add them to Trados for translation (XLS, PPT whatever).

Once translated, export the translations to their original XLS format MAINTAINING THE SAME NAMES. Then go back to the DOCX archive, delete the original files in the word/embeddings folder and copy the new translations in their place.

At this point the work is essentially done, but you'll have to take one more step to "finalize" things. To simplify the reading of the Word document, what you see in the document as you read it is not the original embedded file but rather a snapshot bitmap image of the XLS file. This means that if you open the translated Word document you will still see images of the original embedded XLS files. So to finish things you should reopen the Word document and click or double click on each embedded file which will force Word to load the translated external XLS file then simply click outside the embedded file to force Word to generate a new bitmap image based on the translated content.

That's it, you're done.

Patrick Hopkins 

Thanks for the explanation... looks like the third way though... but with good additional detail for anyone who didn't understand the explanation or didn't watch the video and in particular your final point about forcing Word to reload the external XLS.  That was useful.