I would recommend a macro which opens each workbook in turn and extracts
out the information onto the summary sheet.

Something like

Sub ExtractData()
For N = 1 To 5
Workbooks.Open Filename:="C:\book" & N & ".xls", ReadOnly:=True
Cells(1, 1).Copy
ThisWorkbook.Sheets(1).Cells(N, 1) = Cells(1, 1)
Workbooks("C:\book" & N & ".xls").Close
Next N
End Sub


I've made some assumptions that your source workbooks are called
book1.xls, book2.xls etc. and that the data you want to extract is in
A1


--
mrice

Reserach Scientist with many years of spreadsheet development experience
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