We have massive amounts of information from multiple sources of workbooks
that we need to update constantly on our Excel reports. To make things flow
faster, I set up vlookup, hlookup, with if(isna...) statements.
Unfortunately, my boss and her bosses did not find it intuitive because they
want all the links to point to particular cells directly without formulae
that reference an array of data. For me it will be a long nightmare to link
every cell in my reports to every cell in many different workbooks.

Any suggestions to make this easier? Thank you for your comments.

In article ,
Sally wrote:

Any suggestions to make this easier? Thank you for your comments.

How about telling your boss (and her bosses) to learn about rather basic
XL functions?

Present them with a spreadsheet (with very simple links) that calculates
the loss in productivity they're trying to impose, in

- hours,
- dollars, and
- the *SIGNIFICANTLY* reduced reliability associated with
having to routinely manually input links!

Ask them (politely) what the return on investment for ignorance is...

Alternatively, strict malicious compliance might allow one to put the
VLOOKUPs, HLOOKUPs, IF(ISNA())s, etc. in *other* cells, then create
links to *those* particular cells in the reports...

Thank you JE. I am totally with you, it is a somewhat frustrating situation.
Your "other" alternative sounds interesting but it will still lead to bosses
not being able to see directly what each cell is referencing to. Alas, no
wonder so many people crunch all kinds of spreadsheets in this place whereas
we only needed one Excel person.

"JE McGimpsey" wrote:

In article ,
Sally wrote:

Any suggestions to make this easier? Thank you for your comments.

How about telling your boss (and her bosses) to learn about rather basic
XL functions?

Present them with a spreadsheet (with very simple links) that calculates
the loss in productivity they're trying to impose, in

- hours,
- dollars, and
- the *SIGNIFICANTLY* reduced reliability associated with
having to routinely manually input links!

Ask them (politely) what the return on investment for ignorance is...

Alternatively, strict malicious compliance might allow one to put the
VLOOKUPs, HLOOKUPs, IF(ISNA())s, etc. in *other* cells, then create
links to *those* particular cells in the reports...

It looks like there have been similar questions in this forum about this
age-old problem. I found Pascal 's posting on 9/12/2007 suggesting a
combination of "address" and "match" formula.

So if I take your alternative of a bridge workbook in which I apply the
=address(match....) functions, then I can can translate these cells into the
final output workbook with direct (relative or absolute) references to the
original cells in the source workbook.