Saving in Multiple Locations

You may have a need to routinely copy a workbook to multiple locations on your system. For instance, the open workbook may need to be copied to a local hard drive and to several mapped drives that are actually on your office network.

Excel doesn't have a built-in capability to do this, but if the various locations are well defined, you can create a macro that will do the saving for you. The following macro is an example of such a tool:

Sub SaveToLocations()
    Dim OrigName As String

    OrigName = ActiveWorkbook.FullName
    ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs "G:\" + ActiveWorkbook.Name
    ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs "L:\" + ActiveWorkbook.Name
    ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs "K:\" + ActiveWorkbook.Name
    ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs "S:\" + ActiveWorkbook.Name
    ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs OrigName
End Sub

The particular example of the macro saves the active workbook to five different locations, all using the same workbook name. The macro determines the current location of the workbook so that it can save to the current location last. The reason this is done is so that you can continue to use the regular Save tool and get the expected results.

If you want to use this macro on your own system, all you need to do is to make sure that you change the drive letters of where each workbook will be saved. If one of the drives you specify is for a location that uses removable media, and there is no media in the drive, then the macro will generate an error and stop. You'll then have to figure out where the workbook was originally saved so you can manually resave it there (using Save As).

Another peculiarity of the macro is that since it uses the SaveAs method, if there is already a workbook at each of the destinations with the same name as the current workbook, Excel will ask if you want the existing version of the workbook overwritten. This will always be the case with the last save, into the original location.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2774) 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: Saving in Multiple Locations.