Originally Posted by BigMac'ro

That would be possible if the Excel workbooks wouldn't change. In my case, the report gets regularly updated and so do the Excel files. The old Excel files are kept. For the report in January 2024, I have to refer to excel files called e.g. "202401_Data1.xlsx", "202401_Data2.xlsx",... One month later, it would be "202402_Data1.xlsx", "202402_Data2.xlsx",... That's why I came up with the "reference file" listing all paths to the relevant workbooks. Plus, there are several people working on the report, sometimes with somewhat inconsistent file-naming approaches I think it will be more easy to convince them to keep the reference file up to date than changing their file-naming habits...