Forum Discussion
Group of Excel Sheets Referencing Each Other
I'm fairly new to the company, so I've adopted the process that's been in place for years. It would be above my pay grade to decide to change the process, but I can certainly inquire. There is proprietary info in the sheets, so wouldn't be able to share, but essentially there are several dept's that input their daily data into their respective sheets and then a couple other sheets where the data is consolidated for easy viewing. So far, I've copy and pasted the sheets into a new folder and started updating the references to the new destination name and it just seems like there should be an easier way to do it. At this rate, it will take a full week to manually change each cell.
Well, Paul, I would strongly encourage you to inquire. It really sounds as if what happened in the past is that somebody took what I'd call a "paper ledger sheet mental framework" and transferred it to Excel, thinking it could make things easier. Which it can do; at least the basic arithmetic operations can be trusted.
But it also sounds as if it wasn't designed to take full advantage of Excel. Anytime you find yourself needing to copy and paste all kinds of data, and then update formulas to refer to that "old" data, that's a clue that the process could be improved, maybe radically. There are people here in this forum--I being one of them--who'd be happy to help you (or others) re-think how the data are collected and stored (the INPUT) and then how it's used (the OUTPUT) in ways that take full advantage of Excel's many abilities.