Fixing unintentionally linked Excel Wbooks

Have you ever opened an Excel spreadsheet or workbook to have the unexpected message appear "This workbook contains links to one or more external sources that could be unsafe", followed by the rather cryptic instruction that "If you trust the links, update them to get to latest data". While we puzzle over that, the message continues: "Otherwise, you can keep working with the data you have", followed by three option buttons: "Update", "Don't Update" and "Help".

And clicking the "Help" button does not really help. Hmm. 

It is OK when we know that our s/s has been deliberately linked to workbook. If not, it is one of those 'sigh and Google' moments: where we have a hazy recollection of copying a cell from another workbook, but cannot remember what the workbook was... or even worse, when we have NO idea at all how this can have happened. So we sigh, and Google "unlink Excel workbook".

We trawl through all the unhelpful rubbish, then finally recall that this is actually called "breaking a link" and that our search needs to refer to "an external reference in Excel" (Microsoft Support, 2015).

I have no idea how many times I must have done this. So I decided to include the set of instructions (Microsoft Support, 2015) on how to fix this small, but annoying problem.

So, thanks to Microsoft Support (2015) the instructions to repair are:

• Go to the Data ribbon | Queries & Connections | Edit Links
• In the Edit Links dialog box, under the "Source" list, click the link that we want to break (we can hold down the Ctrl key to select more than one link)
• Then click the "Break Link" button.

Easy when we have instructions!

Sam

References:

Microsoft Support. (2015, August 7). Break a link to an external reference in Excel. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/break-a-link-to-an-external-reference-in-excel-f1ca8b08-4f24-4af6-92e5-f4fdb1442748