have a look in help index for INDIRECT

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Don Guillett
SalesAid Software

"David Clark" wrote in message
...
I would like to write a formula to extract data from a series of workbooks
whose filenames vary by month ie datajan05.xls, datafeb05.xls, etc.

I would like to write the formual so it copies the month from the top of
the
column to create the file name ie =data[a1].xls . This would enable me
then
to copy across the page rather than having to edit every cell formula.

Can anyone help? Thanks.