Mac Forum / Applications / Excel / May 2008

On 4/29/08 5:16 PM, in article ee99fe0.-1@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,

Have you looked in the defined names?  What does the edit links dialog show?
From here you can get the file names and then do a search for that name(s)
on the worksheets.

Hi Bob,
Yes, I did use the Edit Links to see what the name of the external workbooks were, and I tried a search but it didn't come up with anything. I had read in a previous posting that other people have tried this method and it didn't work for them either. They suggested using a tool .... but when I went to look for it there was no indication if it worked in the 2008 version of Excel so I am hesitant to try it until I hear back from the developer. Here is a quote from a posting titled "Finding Pesky Links"

"For hard to find links, download and install Bill Manville's FindLink
add-in:

<http://www.bmsltd.co.uk/MVP/Default.htm>"

Do I need to search for the exact filename or can I just find using a partial file name. The file names are long and weird... so I just used a single word from them like REPORT to search. Someone else suggested using "[" but that seemed to return nothing either. Suggestions?

My feeling at this time is that there ARE no cells actually linked... but before I break the links I'd like to verify this assumption. Does Excel hold on to the link reference even when the cells have been deleted?

Hi Bob,

I did the search again using the suggested parameters, and still didn't find anything. I searched for "[Filename_First_Word".

I began a manual search by switching between worksheets, and at one point an alert notified my that the sheet I was on had a link. I then clicked on each object to manually see what the cell references were, and finally clicked on a Chart and found that it was what had the external reference.

Again, the previous search didn't bring it up, even though the chart was using external references to files I had included in my search attempts.

There are 68 worksheets in this workbook, is there NO way to find out which cells/Charts are using external links? I find it surprising and disappointing that there is no mechanism for dealing with this problem.

I appreciate your help on this. Any suggestions?

On May 2, 2008, at 9:45 AM, Bob Greenblatt wrote:

I need to find them because I need to know what I am changing. I have no idea when I "break" a connection what I am breaking. Basically, how do I know which of the 200 charts I've just broken? Go through and try a visual inspection to see if I can figure out which chart no longer has a series attached to it? This will take me forever! It's not obvious, some of the charts have empty series fields which are being filled in as time goes on, so it's not really obvious which are empty on purpose and which are actually getting data from external sources.

I really appreciate your responses, but I was hoping that more than just one person was looking at this board and might have some ideas. I can try and post a request to the Microsoft features page for future revisions, but frankly a future fix will not solve my immediate problem.

Thanks anyway, I appreciate all your suggestions.