Here's my desired outcome: I want an Excel workbook (say Master.xls) that I can drop into a directory of other Excel workbooks and Master.xls will extract a given range of cells from all of the hundreds of other workbooks in that directory. I have multiple directories with hundreds of Excel files in each, so I need a Master.xls file that will easily move between directories with different file paths and update based on the files around it in the directory. In my Master.xls file, I can build the file names for all of these other workbooks using text functions like CONCATENATE.
The problem comes when I try to use Excel to reference cells in workbooks that are not currently open. The problems:
- INDEX can access closed workbooks using hard-coded paths, but can't (as far as I can tell) accept cell ranges as text. To enter cell ranges as text to other functions, one has to use the...
- INDIRECT function, which doesn't work for closed workbooks.
Basically, INDEX can solve my problem but I can't figure out how to get it to work without hard-coding the paths to the closed workbook into the function call. That's a deal breaker, since I have thousands of workbooks to reference and doing a find-replace to change the file path for each workbook is time-prohibitive and not maintainable.
Other constraints: no Excel add-ins since this sheet has to be shared with others and no VBA because this has to be used by people with fear of macros. I recognize that Excel is not the right tool for this job. Believe me, if I could use another tool, I would.
Update: sample Excel sheet showing the problem:
