JMay wrote...
....
=Indirect(" '???'!"& B3), then ??? becomes
[????"
At this point I'm getting uncertain of what's going on. Can you assist
me in some way?
What's inside INDIRECT needs to be a syntactically valid external
reference as text. Try creating literal external references by pressing
= then [Ctrl]+[F6] to switch to another workbook, press an arrow key
then [Enter]. You should be back in workbook in which you typed the =
with a simple formula showing an external reference.
In short, the filename part will appear inside square brackets. The
worksheet name will follow immediately after the right square bracket.
If there are any spaces, hyphens or characters other than just letters,
numerals and underscores, the bracketted workbook name and worksheet
name together will appear within single quotes. Immediately after this
there'll be an exclamation point which serves as a separator between
the [workbook]worksheet name and the cell address, and after it
there'll be the cell address.
While there are times that Excel doesn't need the single quotes, it
always accepts them, much the same as you can enter whole numbers like
five as 5.000, so it's always safest to include single quotes when
constructing text references.
As for the square brackets, there has to be some way of distinguishing
the workbook name from the worksheet name. In your original example,
B1&B2 == "Temp11Bob". How would Excel be able to tell this wasn't a
worksheet named Temp11Bob? So something needs to separate Temp11 and
Bob. Microsoft chose to use square brackets (unfortunately, since
square brackets were and are legal filename characters in all Mac OS
versions and in all 32-bit versions of Windows) around the base
filename. It's a necessary part of the syntax.