How do i add cells from different workbooks? | Excel forum

Cheryl,
When working with formulas that link multiple workbooks, I would very strongly recommend that you use named Ranges - which we looked at on the course. That is, the formula to add two values from different workbooks would look like this:

= 'some book 1.xlsx'!Total + 'some book 2.xlsx'!Total

(where Total is a range name in both books), rather than:

= '[some book 1.xlsx!some sheet'!B52 + '[some book 2.xlsx!some sheet'!B52

Not only is the first form more understandable, it is also much more robust in the face of structural changes to the workbooks (e.g. adding or deleting rows). With the cell-address form, formulas only update if both source and destination workbooks are open at the same time, so the liklihood of cross-workbook formulas 'breaking' is quite high.

regards
/Roy