Excel links don't work anymore after upgrade 2010 to 2016.

[Marianne_NL]

A client is presently upgrading it's IT system from Windows 7 & Excel 2010 to Windows 10/Office 365 & Excel 2016. In the new environment the external links used are not working anymore (links in formulas to figures from other documents and Excel tables that were copied as linked images in Word documents). The formulas are allright and the location of files has not been changed - but as soon as we update the links an error appears. Only after opening all source documents that are linked to the destination file the links work nolrmal - however, as soon as the source documents are closed the links give error message again.

Does anyone recognize this problem and knows how to solve it without re-doing all formulas? Saving the documents under another name in .xslx format did help but is a quite teadious job...
Thanks in advance!

 

[ChrisGault]

I don't know how big your client is and how many files you're talking about, but perhaps this would work......If opening the files and saving as an .xlsx file fixes the problem, it seems that it would be possible to use code to cycle through each .xls file in each folder, at least the folders where the files with the linked data are stored, and open each file, save as .xlsx format, close it and move on to the next one in the folder?

 

[Marianne_NL]

I don't know how big your client is and how many files you're talking about, but perhaps this would work......If opening the files and saving as an .xlsx file fixes the problem, it seems that it would be possible to use code to cycle through each .xls file in each folder, at least the folders where the files with the linked data are stored, and open each file, save as .xlsx format, close it and move on to the next one in the folder?

Yes, that is what I planned to do - but it is quite a complicated file structure so I hoped to find an other solution.
Moreover, one problem remains: links to files that are in "table format" are not restored in this way. It seems that in Excel 2016 links that use table names in the references can not be updated.