I have a presentation used for our new employee orientation that lists when specific forms are due. For example, Health Insurance form must be turned in 60 days from hire date. I would like the date to automatically update to be 60 days from the current date each time the presentation is ran.
I currently have a text box linked to an Excel spreadsheet which has a formula =NOW()+60. This works great, but it still does not update unless you first double click on the text box to activate/open the Excel spreadsheet, which then refreshes to the current date and updates the correct future date.
This is not a workable solution however because in the first place there are about 6 different instances (embedded in over 100 slides) of these future dates that need to be double clicked and updated, and in the second place, I am not running the presentation myself, but instead a subject matter expert is, who is NOT technically savvy enough to even double-click text boxes to force a refresh.
I am hoping find code that would either insert a future date automatically directly into the PowerPoint text box -or- open and refresh the linked Excel objects each time the PowerPoint is opened.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
If you have to doubleclick to get the formula to refresh, it seems likely that the spreadsheet is embedded, not linked. If you link the info instead, you'd only need to open the Excel file and save again to force the date to change, then open the PPT, which'd see the updated Excel file and update the links.
PPT will open/close Excel once per link; if you have lots of links, this can be quite time-consuming, but for six instances, I doubt it'd be bad.
This could also be done in code, but then you'd need to turn it the code into an add-in and install it on the end-user's PC to give them a one-click solution. If they can't be trusted to doubleclick the dates to update them, I'm not sure you'd want to teach them how to run macros embedded in the presentation itself. If creating an add-in is a possibility, give a shout and I'll make a couple suggestions on how you could do the coding.
Related
tl;dr: Is there a way to have multiple (10+) excel Macro workbooks run the same project from a single location so that if I need to fix a bug, I don't need to fix it in every single workbook?
Long version:
My company uses excel workbooks for engineering charts. Any changes are formatted as bold and highlighted gray. We then have a revision "table" at the bottom (I say "table" because it's just some merged cells - there doesn't seem to be a way to make a separate table that doesn't follow the column sizing for the rest of the workbook, but that's a question for another day).
When we do a new revision, we have to first clear any formatting from the previous revision, make our changes (and format them), then insert a row to the revision "table", then unformat the previous revision entry and reformat our new revision entry. Then, we export the workbook as a PDF which we name according to our print naming format. However, it is easy to make mistakes when doing this because the file name must be manually entered according to the format.
To make this process less tedious/error-prone, I wrote a VB macro program to automate the above steps, among other things. It works great, and will be implemented on our charts company wide.
However, I can only do so much testing on my own - there are bound to be things I missed or can do more efficiently (I'm an engineer, not a professional programmer). And we have dozens of engineering chart spreadsheets. If we implement this and then I discover I need to fix a bug or make an improvement to part of the program, I don't want to have to fix it in every single workbook - that would take way too long and be too easy to miss a workbook!
Any advice would be appreciated.
I have a pretty simple file now that was built on a basis of an old complex file with a lot of links. In this testing file, Alpha (link) there is only 1 value, which refers via formula to 1 value of another workbook. The second workbook (Beta) (link) is completely new, except I added there one value.
Issue: when I'm opening workbook Alpha, I have a lot of popups that appear after the button in "Update links" window was clicked, or when I trigger "Enable Content". Popups like this (screen 1, screen 2) with links to other strange old workbooks and with old paths. I can't understand where should I start searching for reasons of this if I already broke all links in the workbook Alpha, which were there, cleaned up all macro were contained, and have only one link to a fresh workbook Beta (which have no connection with links you can see in popups).
Thank you for taking a look.
Some links are hard to find. They can be in formulas, conditional formatting, named ranges, etc.
If you want to speed up the search, you may want to use a 3rd party tool. Long-time Excel MVP Bill Manville wrote a VBA add-in that finds links in the worbook. It's available for free here: https://www.manville.org.uk/software/findlink.htm
It has saved me hours of time in many situations.
Finally, after all those weeks I've found out the answer: the reason was in hidden names, which you can't see through the usual Name Manager. I've found them and removed via Document Inspector (images):
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I have an Excel file on SharePoint.
Multiple people edit said file.
Offline and online.
Excel unfills all calculated cells (VLOOKUP and MATCH) that depend on other sheets in the same workbook at random.
So if you would open or reload that file, suddenly all the cells that use VLOOKUP or MATCH would be blank.
Upon further investigation nobody changed anything or deleted anything.
It just happens randomly.
Now it has happened 2 weeks ago and just today.
I have an interim solution that is to go to a cell with a formula, hit return, then click „overwrite all cells in this column with this formula“ and then click undo to prevent custom cell content to be overwritten.
Everything is back to normal afterwards.
I talked to a colleague, he has the exact same issue also totally at random.
He also encountered this on files that are not being edited by multiple people but himself.
So it is not dependent on the file itself.
Could the language play into this problem?
On some PCs Excel is in English and on some in German.
=IFERROR(IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(D185,Sheet1!$B$3:$D$616,3,FALSE)),(VLOOKUP(D185,'Sheet2'!$B$3:$D$22200,3,FALSE)),(VLOOKUP(D185,Sheet1!$B$3:$D$616,3,FALSE))),"")
Seems like your sheet isn't calculating upon open. See if this link is of use to you.
https://superuser.com/questions/448376/what-is-the-excel-hotkey-to-re-calculate-all-formula-in-sheet
Also check your program settings and see if auto-calculate sheets is enabled. Don't know from the top of my head where it is located.
Alternative create a small vba function to force recalculate on workbook open.
Getting Excel to refresh data on sheet from within VBA
My question is about issues with linked formulae in Excel spreadsheets.
I have a complicated structure of linked Excel Spreadsheets updated each month for Financial reporting.
The problem I have is that I will often update the values in source files. The links feed through correctly. Then I save all the files with the updated values in source and target files.
The problem arises when I reopen the files at a later time Excel forgets the revised figures. Then I need to go back and open the source files to make it pick up the new values again.
This problem is getting worse and worse, happening more and more for no apparent reason.I seem to spend half my time re-opening source files to update the linked values.
It seems like the Internal Table that Excel keeps for links is remembering old values and not saving the new one ones when I update the table.
So my question is this - how do I stop Excel doing this, how do I force it to remember the new linked values when they change in the source sheet and stop it from reverting to previous remembered values ?
To be clear, every time I do this I save everything in sight, but it makes no difference.
I have also tried to relinking to a different copy of a file and then linking back. This works sometimes, but not always.
If you're not getting this warning every time you open the 'target' workbook:
...then there's a good chance the problem is that, at some point, automatic update of external links was disabled.
To re-enable it:
On the Data tab, in the Connections group, click Edit Links
Click the Startup Prompt button
Choose the 1st or 3rd option.
Close & save all open workbooks and try it again.
If you chose the third option in step 3, all links should update automatically.
If you chose the first option in step 3, you will be asked if you want to update the links.
More Information:
Office.com : Control when external references (links) are updated
I am currently working on an MS Excel 2013 spreadsheet (p:\master.xlsx) where some cells contain values that are directly linked from other MS Excel 2013 spreadsheets (p:\path1\feeder1.xlsx, p:\path1\feeder2.xlsx, etc).
What I am finding occasionally (not every time), is when I open up my p:\master.xlsx spreadsheet (and then "enable editing" and "enable content"), some of the values in this spreadsheet change from the correct linked value (a number) to value #REF.
When I look at the formula within these offending cells, I see it has also changed from say:
=MAX('P:\path1\[feeder1.xlsx]Sheet1'!$C:$C)
to
=MAX('P:\path1\[feeder1.xlsx]#REF'!$C:$C)
I can confirm the feeder.xlsx spreadsheet has not been moved or renamed and has not had it's values changed at all. The network drive the files sit on is also stable.
What is confusing me is that this appears to happen at random times (as opposed to every time). In addition, not all the cells revert to #REF - some of the values are still OK (and thus the formula is OK).
Due to not knowing if or when the formulas will change to their "#REF" status, I need to save the file every time I make a change (slightly frustrating).
I searched the forum and noticed another user had a similar issue on MS Excel 2010 but the answers provided did not appear to solve the user's issue. Anyone have any suggestions?
First make sure you're formula is not too long if your using 97-2003. if so save the file as .xlsx
if that don't work do the following
close all open workbooks.
open the workbook with the (now) broken links (#ref).
Click on the Data tab
Click on Edit Links.
Excel doesn't like links to closed workbooks