Microsoft® Office Excel 2003 Inside Out

Linking Workbooks

Creating dynamic links between workbooks with external reference formulas provides a number of advantages. For example, you could break a large, complex company budget model into more manageable departmental models. Then you could link all the departmental workbooks (supporting workbooks) to a master budget workbook (a dependent workbook). In addition to creating more manageable and flexible models, linked workbooks can save recalculation time and memory.

This section discusses some special considerations to be aware of when working with workbooks linked by external reference formulas. For more information about external references, see "Creating References to Other Worksheets in the Same Workbook" and "Creating References to ...