Link Excel Spreadsheets for 2015

There’s no better time of year to think ahead to how you can link your spreadsheets to automatically summarize annual data.

Often times, depending on what type of information we gather, there is opportunity to save monthly data on separate sheets. Let’s use financial data as an example. You can duplicate one of last year’s sheets, remove the month specific numbers leaving blank cells ready for 2015 data. However before you spoil this brand new sheet you want to duplicate it eleven times, then name each sheet by month and finally a thirteenth sheet as your annual summary sheet. This example does assume that you track pretty much the same information each month, say expenses.

Here’s how:
1. Duplicate an expense sheet from the previous year into a new file and remove month specific data only – leave the formulas!
2. Duplicate the new sheet 12 times so that you end up with a total of 13
3. Rename the first 12 sheets by month and the last one SUMMARY.
4. On the Summary sheet enter the formulas that sum all the totals for each month.