How do I link with certain aspects?

  • Thread starter Thread starter akemeny
  • Start date Start date
A

akemeny

Ok... here's what I need to do. My company has MANY spreadsheets, currently,
that house our data. We record all aspects of our project in Excel and run
all of our reports in Excel as well. I need to know if there is a way to
link 1 spreadsheet to ALL of the spreadsheets that we have so that it will
pull data by a specific range (i.e. date, time, etc). Is this possible?
What is the formula for that?
 
Whenever I hear that a business or department is recording lots of data in
LARGE NUMBERS of workbooks I cringe. Excel is one of the best software
packages EVER, but it isn't a good substitute for a real database. Even MS
Access would be far preferable to what you've described.

There is no formula/function that you can use to link to ALL your workbooks.
They have to be specifically identified in a formula in some fashion or
another.

While what you are describing can be accomplished (in theory) by a macro
that opens or pulls in every workbook in a directory, the success of that
effort is dependent on the uniformity of the layout and content of the
workbooks and on the skill of the VBA/macro coder.

My advice to you is put this information in a database where multiple users
can simultaneously enter and edit data, and where you can easily query the
data and report on it (and back it up). Failing that, put it all in a single
worksheet in a single workbook. Mark every row with a project identifier,
and then use Excel's sorting and filtering features to accomplish what you
want.
 
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