I am linking a master spreadsheet to numerous spreadsheets. I am pulling in text back to the master spreadsheet. I know that excel has a 255 character limit for linked cells. I noticed however that when I initially establish the link I can pull in 700+ characters. I have realized that you get all the characters when the source spreadsheet is open. In my case opening that many large spreadsheets would probably overload my computer. Is there a way to trick excel into getting all this without opening all these files?