As stated in the help on Indirect, it does not work with a reference to a
closed workbook. Open the workbook and change your string to the workbook
name and it will work. Using a defined name does not solve this.

Harlan Grove has written a UDF that works in this situaiton by opening a
second instance of excel, opening the closed file, getting the information,
closing the file, closing the second instance of excel and returning the
information. I have never used it, so I can't imagine what the speed
penalty must be.

Another alternative is have event driven code actually change the hard coded
reference.


--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy


"DoctorG" wrote in message
...
Does anyone know how we can create an external reference from a string
value
"pointing" to the external table?

Example
----------
A1=my_internal_table (content is text)
A2='C:\EXCELFILE.xls'!my_external_table (content is again text)

index(my_internal_table;2;1) --- works
index(indirect(A1);2;1) --- produces same result as previous
index('C:\EXCELFILE.xls'!my_external_table;2;1) --- works
index(indirect(A2);2;1) --- does not work (#REF!)