I have several excel documents all referencing one another. The set
of 8 Excel workbooks (multiple worksheets in each book) come together
to create a forecasting model for our business. It was developed by
someone much more savy in Excel than myself and now I need to make a
change.

My question is this:

Here is an example of a naming convention for one workbook:
"Final-DW2003 - 010603" meaning it is a final for the salesman "DW"
for the year 2003 - last updated 01-06-03. I have made numberous
updates to this workbook and I would now like the naming convention to
indicate that it was updated in 12-11-03. So, I would like to rename
the workbook to reflect that but because every workbook uses formulas
and references to "Final-DW2003 - 010603" if I rename the file, I
would have to re-name every formula in 8 workbooks and countless
worksheets.

How can I do this?

Related to this question is that some changes that a manager made to
the database have now caused certian formulas to reference a file on
her desktop. Obviously, that works for her, but anyone who wants to
look at the workbook who isn't at her computer, with her desktop
files, can't view the worksheets. How do I "remap" (I am probably
using the wrong term there) but how do I find what my problem is,
determine how it should be written and then find every reference to
her "desktop" and replace it with the proper location?

Thank you for your wealth of knowledge!

Colleen
Confused in Milwaukee

The second part of your post shouldn't be too hard to address. Once you get
the workbooks open on your machine you should be able to see the bad link
under Edit, Links. You can select it in the list of linked files, choose
"Change Source" and point to the correct file location.

The first part... You could go the Edit, Links, Change Source route with
each dependent workbook but an easier way is to have all the dependent
workbook open in Excel, along with the source workbook, when you do a File,
Save of the source workbook to its new name. Then all the links will be
updated automatically by Excel. You'd have to save them all after that of
course...

--
Jim Rech
Excel MVP