External Link and Dependency Mapper

Excel tells you this workbook has a link to another file. It will not tell you where that link lives. This does — every formula, defined name, validation list, conditional format and hyperlink that points outside this workbook, with the exact cell or the exact name.

It is the answer to the search everybody types eventually: find external links Excel can't find. The whole report is free, on every sheet, with no limit.

Why Edit Links is not enough

Data › Edit Links reports that a link exists. It has never reported where. That is the entire genre of tutorial about phantom links, and every one of them ends with the same advice: press Ctrl+F and search for a square bracket. That finds links in cell formulas — the case you would already have found — and nothing else.

Neither Edit Links nor the Workbook Links pane on the web looks in any of these:

• Defined names. A name whose definition points at another file. There is no cell to find, so Ctrl+F finds nothing at all. This is the link people lose afternoons to, and it is the first thing this add-in checks.
• Data validation lists. A dropdown reading its options from another workbook. When that file is unavailable the list is empty and the cell accepts anything.
• Conditional formatting rules. A rule that reads another file. It stops updating silently — no error, no warning, just formatting that quietly means nothing.
• Hyperlinks. Not links in the Edit Links sense, so never listed there, and broken by exactly the same folder reorganisation.

What it reports

• Where every link lives — sheet and cell, or the name, or the range a validation or formatting rule covers. Click it and the pane selects it.
• Links to a local path. C:\Users\jane\Documents\Rates.xlsx works perfectly for Jane and for nobody else on earth. The workbook gives no sign of it until somebody else opens the file.
• Links to a personal OneDrive. The same problem wearing a URL. A colleague cannot open it, and it disappears when that person leaves.
• Links that have already broken — a #REF! reference, a #REF! defined name, a linked formula sitting in error.
• Phantom links. On Excel on the web, a file Excel lists as a source that nothing in the workbook actually references. That one can be broken with no effect on any value, and this add-in can break it for you.
• The dependency map — which sheets read from which, which sheets nothing reads, where the loops are, and how deep the longest chain runs.

And what it says it did not check

Chart series, shapes and OLE objects, and the source behind a pivot cache cannot be inspected from an Excel add-in at all — Office.js exposes no link target on any of them. Where your workbook has them, the report says so, by name and count.

That sentence is deliberate. A tool built on the complaint that Edit Links reports a link and leaves you to find it cannot then go quiet about its own blind spots. Knowing what you do not know is most of what an audit is for.

Windows, Mac and the web

The report is the same on all three. Every link is read out of formula text, which works identically everywhere.

Breaking links is Excel on the web only, and that is Excel's own limit rather than ours: the API that enumerates and breaks workbook links exists in Excel on the web and has no desktop equivalent. On Windows and Mac the pane says so instead of showing a button that does nothing. Open the same workbook in a browser to use it, or use Data › Edit Links.

What it costs

Free: the scan and the full report — every location, every sheet, unlimited. The report is the product, so it is not the part behind a paywall.

£30 a year: the exportable report (CSV and plain text — the artefact you attach to a file note), breaking links with a preview first, and the dependency map. Prices and checkout.

Your data

Everything happens on your machine. No workbook content is transmitted anywhere — and that includes the file paths and URLs this add-in exists to read, which are parsed in memory and never leave. The only things that ever cross the network are a licence key and an anonymous install id, and only when you activate one. Privacy notice.

Known limits

• "Stale" means three things here and nothing else: the workbook is set never to refresh links, a linked formula is currently in error, or the reference itself no longer resolves. A task pane cannot read the modified date of a file on your disk, so this does not claim to know when a link last updated.
• A cached value from a file that has been deleted looks exactly like one from a file that still exists. There is no file system in a task pane. Such a link is reported as a link, not as a broken one.
• Excel on Mac and on iPad are untested. The manifest permits them, so Microsoft lists them, but no verification run has happened on either.
• The impact count is a floor. "At least 14 cells" counts the cells that reference the link directly. Cells that depend on those cells are not counted.

Support

support@appgarden.co.uk. A workbook with a link this add-in missed, or one it reported wrongly, is the most useful thing you can send.