Relative links for emailed files

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Guest

I have created a workbook (A) that pulls data from workbooks (B) and (C). If
I combine A with B or C or both, the resulting workbook becomes too large to
email. If I email the files separately to other users (who are not
especially Excel literate), the links in A fail to update, since they are
pointing to files on my computer, not theirs. I'm very reluctant to ask
users to edit the links in A to point to the correct files; I've got little
confidence that will be successful.

Is there a way to specific relative, not absolute file path names, so that
as long as B and C are in the same directory as A, a remote user can download
all three files into one directory and have the links in A work correctly?

Many thanks in advance for your help.
 
I have created a workbook (A) that pulls data from workbooks (B) and
(C). If I combine A with B or C or both, the resulting workbook
becomes too large to email. If I email the files separately to other
users (who are not especially Excel literate), the links in A fail to
update, since they are pointing to files on my computer, not theirs.
I'm very reluctant to ask users to edit the links in A to point to the
correct files; I've got little confidence that will be successful.

Is there a way to specific relative, not absolute file path names, so
that as long as B and C are in the same directory as A, a remote user
can download all three files into one directory and have the links in
A work correctly?
Click to expand...

I suspect that's how it works already.

As a test, there were two workbooks in folder f1. Book1 has links to Book2.
I sent two workbooks as separate attachments in an email message to myself.

After saving the two received attachments in folder f3, I could open Book1
and the links were updated to point to ...f3\[Book2.xls]... automatically.

I'm not sure exactly why or how this works. Maybe Excel keeps track of how
a link originally was defined in order to be helpful in this way. Granted,
it might work differently going from one computer to another.

(I have Excel 2003.)
 
If it's too large to email, just use WinRar to create smaller,
self-extracting .rars
This way you don't have to worry about links.
 
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