How to Work with Links from Other Sheets in Excel

How to Link to other sheets in Excel?

Linking to other sheets is a very common task in Excel. There are several ways to work with links from other sheets.

The first option would be just starting to write a formula in the cell with “=“ and then reference the cell in the other sheet.

Another way of doing it would be with the “Paste Special” option in Excel. Let’s work on the example for that option below.

Example of Working with Links in Excel

Copy cells you’d like to reference in the other sheet as a reference. In our example, it’s the B4 – D4 cell range. Use Excel shortcut Ctrl + C to copy.

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Use shortcut Ctrl + Page Down to move to the next sheet clockwise in Excel.

Go to the cell where you’d like to paste the link from another sheet. Use Excel shortcut Ctrl + Alt + V for the “Paste Special” window.

In the “Paste Special” window click the button “Paste Link”, you can just click “L” on your keyboard as it’s underlined.

Perfect, you can see in the formula bar on the picture below that the cells B2 – D2 are the links to the sheet “Copy Paste”.

How to trace the links in Excel?

The formula bar in Excel would show you the name of the sheet and the cell of where the link came from. However, it could be very time consuming to jump to the linked cell with only that knowledge in hands, especially if your financial model is very complex and there are multiple sheets in your spreadsheet you are working with.

We’d like to teach you a simple time saving tool to track the links from other sheets.

Let’s have a look at our example below.

In our example $50 in the cell B3 is the link from another sheet.

Excel shortcut Ctrl + [ would bring you right to the linked cell in microseconds.

If you’d like to come back to the previous cell after you checked the link, use the “Go To” window in Excel with the shortcut F5.

In the “Go To” you can see that the previous cell is always referenced in the “Reference” field. All we need to do now if to click “Ok” to jump back into that cell.

Conclusion

Working with links in Excel is easy if you know just a couple tricks on how to manipulate and navigate it. For example, the tricks in this article can save you many hours in Excel, as you can do some actions in a microsecond by using Excel shortcuts.

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