Best Practices Please: Folder with linked documents copied regularly on Sharepoint

[lfreibert]

My department is new to sharepoint. Our document library has a folder for each reporting month. Each month we copy the previous month's folder and start there. One of the files is a powerpoint that links tables from about 10 excel files, all of which are in the same folder. Our problem is that when we start a new month by copying the previous month's folder, all of the links in the powerpoint breaks. From what I've read there is not much we can do about this. Can anyone share some best practices related to managing linked documents that must be copied on a regular basis? I'd like to avoid re-linking every slide in the powerpoint each month.

Some notes that may be helpful:

- The library is not synced because we have checkin/out enabled.

- We leverage versioning within each month's folder and would not replace our current file structure with versioning because as the data in our excel files updates any previous versions would be useless as a look-back reference.

- I looked in to document sets and did not get very far. It was not clear if getting rid of our folder structure would help and if it did how it would operate in our case.

[#2]

@lfreibert If the PowerPoint file and the Excel files always are stored in the same folder i think You can re-write the references in the PowerPoint file so that You use "relative references" instead of absolute (hard coded) references. That way the links in the PowerPoint file always points to the Excel files that resides in the same folder as the PowerPoint file.

Regards, Magnus

[#3]

@MagnusGoksoyrOLDProfile thanks for your response. I understand relative vs. absolute references outside of sharepoint but within sharepoint online, the link sources are not a file path but a URL so I am not seeing the usual "$" that would indicate an absolute reference or even how to manually edit that link. Could you clarify how to make the reference relative for sharepoint files?