you can use the indirect function and say dropdown boxes to build paths to
whereever but indirect will only work if the other books are open.Having said
that I think there is some other excel function which will work if the other
books are not open but i cant think of its name just now.

--
paul

remove nospam for email addy!



"Ragnoff" wrote:

I am creating a set of workbooks that have links to one another, which
together represent one month's data. There are 2 'levels' of active
workbooks that change rather often and a few reference workbooks of data used
by the other active spreedsheets, data which does not change often but if it
does the changes need to be reflected by all the active books. A final
summary Workbook containing only formulas and links pulls data from the
active books and shows the current combined efforts of the organization for
the month. The active books are updated daily and have many links to the
reference workbook, and some links to one another, while the summary workbook
with locked formulas and references is extensively linked to the active books.

All of these are in the same project folder, for example August 06. I would
like, when done, to create another complete set for the next project in
September. All of the workbooks will have the exact same names. but will be
in a new subfolder, called September 06. Because of this I was hoping to
have all path references in the external links use variable references such
as:

='.\[North Section.xls]Collected Data'!C10:C25

Instead of

='C:\Reports\August 06\[North Section.xls]Collected Data'!C10:C25

Unfortunately you cannot seem to put .\ in the path of an external link,
only absolute paths seem to be accepted. Is this correct or am I missing
something? IF this is correct, is there some way to include a fuction that
will build the path to the currect folder and then use that path for the
external links?

Any help welcomed!