Indirect seems to only work when the child worksheets are open.
I get #REFs in each cell even though the concatenation makes an identical string as that created otherwise, when I navigate to and click on a cell in an open child worksheet.
Brackets, Exclamation Points, Apostrophes and all.
Perhaps more explanation is needed.
I have 20 separate worksheets whose file names change, call them children.
I want to make a summary worksheet, call it the parent, that displays and works with 10 items of data from all the children.
The children worksheets change names for each project but they themselves are clones so the cell addresses within each remains the same.
Some children are XLS and others are XLSX ( does that matter? )
For the first child, I typed in one set of references then copy/pasted the rest.
Then I used copy/replace to change the filename of the rest and Excel wanted to verify each and every link.
Very tedious, so I figured I would create a list in the parent, naming each child and then concatenating the file names to make a fully qualified address.