"Excel"ing With Links

As you may have noticed, I am in the process of writing a series of Microsoft Excel articles. Many people at work, including my wife, have been bombarding me with questions about it and thought that I’d try to recall these questions and try to answer them to the best of my ability. I will also be writing about other Microsoft Office products in this series.

 

Have you ever wondered how you can link information between files in Microsoft Excel? For example, you want to show last year’s sales figures on this year’s sales figures spreadsheet, but your boss wants you to have two separate files for each.

 

Here are the 4 simple steps on how to do this:

 

1. Open or create the new spreadsheet with the destination cell (such as this year’s sales figures). 

2. Click on the particular cell that you want the information to go to, then type “+” without the quotes, on either the new spreadsheet or on the particular sheet that you want to copy the information to (sheets are tabs at the bottom of your Excel spreadsheet). 

3. Click on the cell that has the source information (such as last year’s sales figure) and hit enter. 

4. Make sure to save the new or opened file. Now when you open it, make sure to click “Update” as this will update any changes to the original file (where you had your last year’s sales figures). 

You can do this for as many cells and as many files as you like. Just make sure not to delete the originating file, since the link will be broken at that point, since Microsoft Excel can’t read the source data.

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Until next time,

Take care - of your clutter!

Post from: Assistant Tips