Excel: How to Find External Links and References

Many people want to know more about how to Find External Links and References in Excel. It would be hard to keep track of all the outside sources that your paper refers to. You won’t be able to find foreign links in a spreadsheet because they are hard to keep track of. Even though Microsoft Excel has many built-in features to help you with different tasks, there isn’t one that will help you find links to sources outside of Excel. The highlighted part of the file tells Excel to open other workbooks and go to a certain cell in one of them. Using this outside link, you can easily change the formula. This feature has some good points, but it also has some bad points. The linked workbook has to be with you at all times, which is a downside.

If you change the name of the linked worksheet, delete it, or move the folder, you won’t be able to change the formula. When a tool doesn’t have some features built in, we have to find other ways to do what we need to do. In the same way, we found some helpful tricks that can help you find external links in a spreadsheet. When using Microsoft Excel, it’s common to look in the current workbook for links and references to things outside of Excel. In this piece, you’ll learn all the simple and easy ways to Find External Links and References in Excel, with examples and pictures to help you understand.

How to Find External Links in Excel used in formulas

1. Find the Excel sheet where you want to find links to other sites and open it.
2. To open the “Go To” dialog, press the “Ctrl” and “G” buttons on your computer at the same time.
3. Click “Special” in the “Go To” menu and then “Objects.”
4. Choose “OK.”
5. The program then picks up all of the items on the worksheet, and you can move between them by pressing the “Tab” key on your keyboard.
6. Look in the formula bar, which says “f(x),” and use the search bar to find a reference to another file or worksheet.

How to find external links used in defined names

1. Find the Excel sheet where you want to find links to other sites and open it.
2. Find the tab called “Formulas” at the top of the program and click on it.
3. Click on the “Name Manager” choice in the “Defined groups” menu that comes up.
4. Under the “Name Manager” button, you can see all of the names in your worksheet. Look at the “Refers To” column next to each item to see what it means.
5. If the item has an external link, you can see the reference to another workbook and click on it to see it.

How to find external links in chart titles

1. Find the Excel sheet where you want to find links to other sites and open it.
2. Click on the title of the chart you want to look for links outside of.
3. Find the formula bar, which looks like “f(x).”
4. Use the search bar to type in the name of the reference for the external link. This will make any open external links show up.

How to find external links in chart data series

1. Find the Excel sheet where you want to find links to other sites and open it.
2. Find the “Layout” tab at the top of the app and click on it.
3. Select the button next to the “Chart Elements” box in the “Current selection” group of the “Layout” tab.
4. If they are available for external link verification, all data sets are shown.

How to Remove External Links in Excel

1. Open the Excel workbook that contains the external links.
2. Go to the “Data” tab in the Excel ribbon at the top.
3. Look for the “Queries & Connections” or “Connections” group. The exact name may vary depending on your version of Excel.
4. Click on the “Edit Links” button in the “Queries & Connections” or “Connections” group. This will open the “Edit Links” dialog box.
5. In the “Edit Links” dialog box, you will see a list of all the external links in your workbook.
6. Select the external link you want to remove from the list.
7. Click on the “Break Link” or “Break Connection” button. This will remove the selected external link from your workbook.
8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for each external link you want to remove.
9. Once you have removed all the desired external links, click on the “Close” button to close the “Edit Links” dialog box.
10. Save your Excel workbook to make sure the changes are applied.

What are External Links or References?

When you use a data point from another workbook in an Excel formula, Excel makes a link to that workbook. So, your code might look something like this: Note that the yellow part is the external link, which is also called an external reference. This part of the formula tells Excel to go to this workbook (Score.xlsx) and refer to the given cell in that worksheet. When you put an external link in your formula, you can update it immediately when the data in the linked workbook changes.

The problem is that you have to have that linked worksheet open all the time. The data would not change if you deleted the linked worksheet file, changed its name, or moved it to a different folder. If you have to share a workbook with coworkers or clients and it has links to websites outside of the workbook, it’s best to get rid of these links. But doing this by hand can drive you to exasperate if you have a lot of numbers.