Hi Nelly

It isn't all that difficult to do this and the advice you received is
largely correct but if the files are scattered around different folders thats
more problematic, anyway other than opening them all together you can use the
file system to search for XLS files and open each one in turn checking its
name.

A few questions
A) Are they all in the same folder ?
B) Are they named similarly (EG Menu001, Menu002, etc) or in a pattern (EG
Menu*.XLS) ?


"Nelly" wrote:

We have about 5000 recipes in separate spreadsheets and i have been asked to
compile a list of the recipe names into a new spreadsheet.
I could open every individual recipe and copy/paste the filename into the
new spreadsheet but that will take forever.
Is there a way to tell the spreadsheet to look at the xls files and extract
the info required (the recipe name is always in the the same cell ref),
without openeing the files?
I have been informed from another group that VBA would be required and
that you can't get information out of a spreadsheet without opening it, but
that
opening can be done with screen updating off, so the user doesn't see it
happening.

Any help would be gratefully recieved
Thanks