linking?

Help! I have tried to find the answer to this posted, but I couldn't, and I would really appreceiate some help. I don't know if this is possible but here is what I am trying to do:
I want to make a phone list for our company in excel . I want one page of the workbook to be the "master", and on the other pages I can make shorter lists for each of the departments with selected numbers from the master list. Is there a way to "link" (I don't know if that is the right term) cells to the master list, so that when I have to update a number I can just do it on the master list and it will automatically update the other lists it is on?
I hope this makes sense. Thank you for your help.

In cell A5 of sheet 1 (Master) type a word, any word. Click on sheet 2's tab, and put an equals sign = in cell A1. Now click on sheet 1's tab, click on cell A5, and then press enter. Sheet 2's A1 is now linked to sheet 1's A5. Change the word in sheet 1's A5 and the word in sheet 2's A1 will also change. It will only work properly if only sheet 1 is ever altered. Once the 2 worksheets have been completed it would be safer to enable protection on both sheets, and keep a back up in a safe place.

Something like this should get you started. Assuming you have three titles accros A1:C1 in the 'Master' sheet with one of these titles being 'Dept'. Place these same titles at the top of each department sheet and in the cell under the title 'Dept', write in the department name as it appears on the master sheet. Place this code in a module and run it on each departement sheet that you want to update (do this in a test sheet to see how it works first)

Sub FillDeptPhoneList()

Dim MasterRange As Range

Set MasterRange = Sheets("Master").Columns("A:C")

With ActiveSheet

'Ensures that the activesheet isn't 'Master'
If .Name = "Master" Then GoTo Finish

'Clears the contents of previous filtered data
.Range("A4:C5000").ClearContents

'Re-populates data area with new filtered data
MasterRange.AdvancedFilter Action:=xlFilterCopy, _
CriteriaRange:=.Range("A1:C2"), _
CopyToRange:=.Range("A4:C5000"), _
Unique:=False

End With

Finish:

End Sub

This assumes your master sheet is called "Master"

Hope this gives you an idea on where to head!!

Cheers!

Something else that you may want to consider is linkg an Access database to Excel. Have your complete data in Access and link your data from Access to Excel using Data->Get External Data-> New Database Querry

The advantages of this is that Access is a proper database program (I guess ) and you'll only need to refresh data to update each page. This can also be more automated using VBA but I won't go into explaining it all for now because you may not even head down this road.

Cheers!