You can paste links between cells within Excel, so that the value of a cell within a workbook will simply be the value of another selected cell. For example, if you had a cell that added the cells above it within one worksheet and you wanted to paste a link to that cell into a cell within another worksheet so that the value shown in the second cell would always be a reflection of the value being calculated in the first cell. You can do this in Excel by using the “Paste Link” function to paste a link between two cells in a worksheet, a workbook, or even between two cells in two different workbooks! You can select to paste a link between two cells so that when the value in the copied cell is changed, the value displayed in the linked cell reflects the change. This is very handy when using the result of a formula as the basis for other formulas in linked workbooks or worksheets. For example, if you had a workbook that totaled sales per month on one worksheet, and another worksheet in the same workbook that totaled the monthly sales per quarter, you could copy and link the totals from the first worksheet into the second worksheet. That way, any changes made to the data in the first worksheet would be automatically reflected in the second sheet!
To copy a link between cells, first copy the cell that you want to link into another worksheet or workbook, and then select the destination cell to link. Then click the “Paste” button’s drop-down menu in the “Clipboard” group on the “Home” tab of the Ribbon to display the drop-down menu of choices. Select the “Paste Link” command to paste the link back to the original cell that you copied. If you are using the “Paste Special” dialog box, you can also click the “Paste Link” button that appears in the lower left corner of the dialog box to paste a link to the original cell that you copied. If you examine the contents of the linked cell, you will see that it is actually a formula. The formula simply states that the cell’s value is to be equal to the value displayed in the cell address shown. The cell address is the address of the cell that was copied.
If you use this feature to paste links between data in separate workbooks you should exercise care not to rename or move those workbooks. Doing so will break any links in the formula references created by the “Paste Link” button, forcing you to delete the links and recreate them again or edit the formula references within each linked cell. As long as you do not move or rename the workbooks, you should be able to change the value in the cell which you copied in one workbook and save your changes. The next time that you open the workbook that contains the linked cells, you may see a message appear onscreen telling you that the workbook contains links to data in other workbooks which has changed. To update the values in the linked cells to reflect the changes, click the “Update” or “Enable content” buttons in Excel to update the data in the linked worksheet, and be sure to save the changes made in this workbook as well.
