Rapid Application Development / Advanced Excel Development

Excel External Links

Externally linked formulas in Excel are both powerful and dangerous. And almost universal.

Benefits of external links

• Using externally linked cells is a fast way to share information between workbooks.
• External links make logical sense to most Excel users
• Occasional use of a small number of linked cells is fairly easy to manage.

Disadvantages of external links

• External links can cause hard to discover circular references (where a cells actually depends on itself, eventually when all the formulas are traced through)
• External links can update in an inconsistent fashion (in all versions of Excel)
• If the source workbook is modified the links may become invalid or incorrect

Codematic Link Manager

Rich control and management of external links has been an important feature of so many of our consulting assignments we developed a utility to help. That utiliy has now been refined into a commercial grade Excel add-in, more information is here.

If you require any more information please get in touch.