Hi - I'm not the most tech savy but I've felt your pain and was
compelled to respond. When I first saw this issue, I had first
converted over to Excel 2003 and was trying to work with files that had
links in them that were created under Excel 2000 - what I understood
was that because of the version diffs, Excel forces links to
calculate/update before saving to your harddrive (even though you said
'don't update' when you first updated the file). When it tries to calc
a link for a file that isn't housed on your harddrive, the link fails
and you get a "#REF!" error. You can get around this by making sure
the 'autocalc upon saving function' is turned off but if you are like
me, you might have some files that have links to files not on your
computer and other formulas that you work with that you do want to
update as you make changes (its apparently an all or nothing calc with
Excel now)...so that was not a feasible option for me.
Excel 2003 has added a 'break the link' function under Edit/Links
however it will appear greyed out and thus not be available if any of
the sheets housing the link have been protected. So unprotect the
sheets and this function works nicely - any cells that had links will
be replaced with the value that the link previously produced.
There is also something called a "Find Link" Add-In function that
someone at the Microsoft Support center gave me that was (and continues
to be) very valuable. This add-in is nice in that it does the same
thing that the above 'breaking links' function does however, this also
allows you to mass-unprotect your worksheets and even delete other
errors out there on your worksheets.
Again, I'm not a techie - maybe someone else has other ideas...
