I am using ArcMap 10.8.1 and am running into an issue where I insert a Word document or Excel sheet as an object into my layout view and when I reopen the map document, those objects are gone. When you click where they should be, it shows an empty box as being selected but no data is there. This is rather inconvenient because then everything housed in those external documents needs to be recreated again within the map.
How can I fix this?