Easily Changing Links

Excel allows you to link information from one worksheet to another, or even from one workbook to another. Many people do this very thing when they use one worksheet as a "summary" overview of information contained in other worksheets.

If you organize your data in this manner, you may be wondering about the best way to change links within your worksheet. When you link information, Excel keeps track within the link of the source of the link. For instance, the following link refers to cell C7 in the OctoberData worksheet of the 2011Budget.xls workbook:

=+[2011Budget.xls]OctoberData!$C$7

If you have quite a few of these links in a worksheet, it can be bothersome to update each link when you change the source workbook or worksheet used by the links. You could, of course, use Excel's find and replace feature to make the desired changes, but there is an easier way: Use the INDIRECT and ADDRESS functions.

For instance, let's assume that you have cells containing a workbook name (J1), a worksheet name (J2), a numeric row number (J3), and a column number (J4). In this instance, you could use the following formula to specify a link:

=INDIRECT(ADDRESS(J3,J4,1,TRUE,"["&J1&"]"&J2))

The result is that Excel calculates an indirect address based on the contents of the cells. If you want to change the place from which Excel pulls information, all you need to do is change the contents of cells J1 through J4, so they represent the desired source.

You should note that you will need to have the source workbooks open in order to use this approach. If they are not open, Excel won't be able to update the information as desired.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (1968) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Easily Changing Links.