Master/slave files

Hi everyone, I wish to do something special with excell and I am not sure if its possible.

Basically, I would like to create a master file that would contain the data from many other excell files in a network in different tabs. Basically, every tab would be the clone of an excell sheet. Can this be done, and if so, how?

Originally Posted by Dohmaker

Hi everyone, I wish to do something special with excell and I am not sure if its possible.

Basically, I would like to create a master file that would contain the data from many other excell files in a network in different tabs. Basically, every tab would be the clone of an excell sheet. Can this be done, and if so, how?

The answer is Yes, but it's a job for VBA. I assume you're wanting to pick up single sheets from many workbooks, and put them in your master workbook on individual tabs. If you have several sheets on each of your slave workbooks, are you sure there are less than 256 sheets in total, otherwise you'll run out of room.

How familiar are you with VBA?

There are two approaches:

1. Hold the names of all your slave workbooks in the master workbook, and have the VBA macro selectively work through all those files in a looping procedure, copying the data and pasting it into the master. If the files are named consistently with just a logical changing character or two, e.g. File1, File2, File3, or FileA, FileB, File C, etc. you could avoid having to keep the names in the Master workbook, and use the looping variable counter as the identifier of the next file.

2. The other approach I've used in the past, is to simply hold all the files in a common directory, then have the macro loop through all the files one by one. The advantage of this is that the names can be quite different and you don't need to know what they are.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Rgds