I have done some search about VLOOKUP to see if it is really can fetch data from a closed workbook. There are two different opinions: some said it could, but others said the source workbook needs to be open first.

My colleague experienced this problem yesterday. She has a spreadsheet which has a VLOOKUP function to get data from another workbook:

=VLOOKUP(A1,'c:\Document\[TOTAL Clients.xls]Data Sheet'!$C$1:$E$65536,3,FALSE)

She noticed that the result is wrong when the source file TOTAL Clients is closed. I asked her to open the source file, and immediately the result works perfectly.

Can Excel expert really give some advice on this question to clarify it?