Reference a cell in another numbers file.

You can not do this currently in Numbers,I know. This has been answered already, but hopefully it may change in the future. This feature would be a tremendously useful tool for rolling forward "year to date" spreadsheets while keeping their sizes manageable. I have one spreadsheet for each of the last ten years of our family finances, but each year I have to manually enter the BOY balance for the coming year when doing budgeting. Of course, during the end of November and into the first weeks of January as I am both budgeting for the new year and closing out the previous year, with balances in multiple checking, savings, investment and charge accounts it is hard to keep them in sync and can sometimes take months to balance an account because of the EOY and BOY amounts matching from to different files. My two cents anyway...

Posted on Dec 14, 2022 11:36 AM

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Posted on Dec 15, 2022 7:26 AM

I'll take the other side of the issue. Numbers (unlike Excel) allows you to easily have multiple tables on one sheet. So there is plenty of room to organize work within one document.


Having one self-contained document has lots of advantages. The main one is that your links won't break when you happen to move one document within the file system. Another one is that it works cross-platform.


So I'd recommend thinking about restructuring your document to take advantage of the Numbers design and its powerful built-in features.


For a checking account, for example, consider keeping all its data in one table rather than splitting it out by year. You can easily use filters, Pivot Tables, Categories or SUMIFS to display and extract yearly information. That is easier (and less error-prone) than carrying EOY balance over as a BOY balance in another table via breakable links.


SG





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Dec 15, 2022 7:26 AM in response to Daobbajay

I'll take the other side of the issue. Numbers (unlike Excel) allows you to easily have multiple tables on one sheet. So there is plenty of room to organize work within one document.


Having one self-contained document has lots of advantages. The main one is that your links won't break when you happen to move one document within the file system. Another one is that it works cross-platform.


So I'd recommend thinking about restructuring your document to take advantage of the Numbers design and its powerful built-in features.


For a checking account, for example, consider keeping all its data in one table rather than splitting it out by year. You can easily use filters, Pivot Tables, Categories or SUMIFS to display and extract yearly information. That is easier (and less error-prone) than carrying EOY balance over as a BOY balance in another table via breakable links.


SG





Dec 15, 2022 9:15 AM in response to Daobbajay

Modern Macs running recent versions of Numbers should be able to handle your financial data in one document with aplomb, unless you're using hundreds of "volatile" functions that need to recalculate every time you make a change.


You might consider whether you need a separate sheet for each account. You can easily organize each account in its own table and also easily have more than one table on each sheet.


You are probably aware that sheets are easily duplicated. (Go to the tab name at the top and choose Duplicate. You can also Copy Sheet, go to a separate document, then Paste Sheet. That can be particularly handy when starting a new period, etc. if you absolutely must keep each time period separate.)


I find searching for historical transactions is MUCH easier if like data is kept together rather than being scattered around in different tables on different sheets. And to view just a specific year it's just a matter of a second or so to apply a filter, probably even quicker than navigating to some other table on a separate sheet perhaps in a separate document).


Anyway, food for thought. I think you may find you can save a lot of time and trouble by restructuring your documents to take better advantage of powerful features in Numbers and avoid reliance on breakable links.


SG







Dec 15, 2022 8:56 AM in response to Daobbajay

i actually use all of the features you mentioned. Your argument is sound except for one detail: file and data management I have a sheet for each checking, savings and investment account, all of our credit cards on separate sheets as well as store charge accounts. I can easily see my cash flow, account balances, etc. I don’t want an active spreadsheet that contains all my transactions for my entire financial life, just the current year. Yes I want the history but I don’t want a file that’s so big it takes minutes to recalculate a formula or to search for something. I have each year’s transactions in a historical folder so I can easily search a single year orthe whole set if I need to find a past transaction.

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Reference a cell in another numbers file.

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