What you want to accomplish can be done with links.

You can set the value of a cell equal to the value in another worksheet or
workbook.

=[Book1]Sheet1!$G$9 or a similar formula. If the link is to another
workbook, Excel will ask if you want the data refreshed when your workbook is
openned.
--
Gary's Student


"Bonehead" wrote:

I'm probably asking for the sun and the moon, and I'm not sure if this
doesn't better belong in a general Office or Access forum, but what the hey.

People use a workbook template to create construction bids. I want to
report on that data. Specifically, I want to be able to report on named
cells in each workbook -- Final Price, labor ratio, etc. The workbooks are
all stored in a single directory/folder. I'd like to be able to create a
table at any time of all the data in all the named cells in all the
workbooks. This could be data reference or, probably simpler, data
extraction. I can use Excel or Access to extract or manipulate the data.


In other words, I'd like to be able to come up with a table in which each
spreadsheet in a given directory/folder was a record and each named cell was
a field. New spreadsheets will be added to the directory and I'd like to be
able to account for them. I'm not worried about duplicates, because I can
eliminate them in Access or Excel easily enough.

Is there a way to do this without complicated programming? I've done rather
complex things with Excel and Access, but I'm not a programmer.