Having trouble establishing relative links between Excel spreadsheet and external file of images

balanwilliamson 

• It's that second bullet in your long (and well-written) description that I want to question: WHY Excel? I can understand why Excel for insurance, in that it easily produces a total of the values, etc., but why does the client specifically specify that it has to be Excel to do all the rest of it, images in particular?
• What the client needs is a system that produces a given result. If a different system produced that result with greater facility, greater simplicity of user-interface, wouldn't that be a better solution?
• Another question: how dynamic is the underlying data, the movement of pieces into/out of the museum, or between its various rooms? 

Others here may have experience making Excel jump through the hoops you're describing, and I certainly would defer to them if that's the case, but you have had a lot of views and no other responses.

It sounds to me as if Excel is less than the ideal software for handling all those images. If in fact the data are relatively static, I even wonder if a plain ol' Word document mightn't suffice. More realistically, assuming that what's needed is the ability to dynamically retrieve and/or update the specifics (including images) of any given item, why isn't FileMaker the solution?

You may have thought through all of these questions, I realize, and I certainly am not wanting to just be difficult....it's possible that others will have a solution for you. I love Excel myself, but it's not the right solution to every situation.