Anybody care to help? Much Mahalos (thanks very much) in advance for trying.

I want to be able to gather data from specific cells within multiple excel
spreadsheet files and have them appear on another excel file that will be a
summary list of all the data collected from the other excel files. In other
words, have stuff from a bunch of excel files be automatically imported into
a single excel file.

I've been playing around with the "import external data" functions with
little success. Is there another way? I'm using Microsoft Office Excel 2003.