Find Links to Other Spreadsheets

Nearly everyone who has worked with large document productions has had the worrisome experience of opening an Excel spreadsheet and getting this message:

. . . where are these missing files and how will they effect the data shown on the spreadsheet? Clicking on 'Edit Links' will show a list of the files that must be found.

Accounting for the production of the files that are linked to produced native Excel files is often an overlooked part of electronic discovery. If you can search through the metadata and find an Excel file whose filename matches that of the linked to file (and the metadata specifies the network folder it was collected from), it's still hard to be sure that the version of the file is same as the one used for the same version of the produced native file you need to review.

It is however always possible to find out which cells on the spreadsheet will be effected by the absence of the linked to file(s). We want to find where there are references such as:

=VLOOKUP(A37504,'C:\FooFolder\baseball\[fielding.xls]Fielding'!A$1:F$65536,6,FALSE)

In Find, enter '.xl', with 'Look in:' set to 'Formulas'. The results will list each cell with a link to an outside file. The search results are hyperlinked to the individual cells.