A mechanism is provided for embedding an object in a receiving or client document such that a client application may operate on the embedded object to include interrogation and modification of data contained in the embedded object. When a given document object is embedded into a receiving document, data representing the embedded object is saved to a data stream storage for the receiving document. When the embedded object in the receiving document is subsequently requested in response to an operation executed on the embedded object, the receiving application obtains the data representation of the embedded object from the data stream storage. Once the receiving application obtains the data representation of the embedded object, the receiving application may perform operations on the embedded object by accessing the embedded object via its data representation.