Reference to Lists in another workbook

[jshaner92]

We are working on an excel file that has hardware selections and references. These references are used for programming and data entry purposes so they are very very important. There are so many references that we had to separate out the reference tab to its own workbook. We have gotten the workbooks to be able to reference the lists correctly, but as you can see in the attached screenshots, the lists in the entry spreadsheet are not updating to the same location as the same list in the source spreadsheet. When we insert lines in the source spreadsheet to add a new value, the references in the entry spreadsheet do not update at all.

What is the easiest / best way to reference lists from an external workbook and have them updated automatically?

[Jan Karel Pieterse]

Depends. You show a multi-cell reference on its own, which is rather rare in formulas (usually they are part of things like a VLOOKUP or MATCH function). If a lot of formulas are pointing to the external file I would advise to pull the relevant data from the external file into a separate worksheet of your "working file" as that will be more calculation-efficient. If you insist on using links in formulas, I would advise to use named ranges in the source file to which you point from the target files. See: https://jkp-ads.com/articles/excelnames00.asp