Question

I have several sheets of data that have formulas written to compare values between the sheets. These sheets are comparing current data from today to the previous data from the day before. Daily I have to move the data from the “current” sheet into the “previous” sheet and then update the “current” sheet with todays today. When I cut the data out of the “current” sheet in paste it into the “previous” sheet it will change the formulas by autmatically updating the sheet name within them, which I don’t want it to do. I want the formulas to stay locked and not change when data is moved around.

The work around for this is to copy the data over instead of cutting it, but I want to see if there is any other solution for this.

Here is an example of the formulas I am using

=IF(ISNA(MATCH('Info - Current'!B2,'Diff - Previous'!B:B,0)),FALSE,TRUE)

Then after I physically cut the data out of the “Info – Current” sheet into the “Info – Previous” sheet the formula will change to the example below. Even though the column that the formula is in resides in the “Info- Current” sheet.

=IF(ISNA(MATCH('Info - Previous'!B2,'Diff - Previous'!B:B,0)),FALSE,TRUE)

Answer 1

When you cut and paste formulas, Excel updates the pasted formulas to still point to the original cell references in the formulas. This is because you are moving some of the data. The moved data is still tied directly to the originally referenced cells.

When you copy and paste the formulas, Excel assumes you mean to duplicate formulas relative to the cells that the formulas reference. In other words, it doesn’t alter the formulas to keep them linked to the original cells that the formulas referenced.

You have already found the best solution, which is to copy and paste to the new workbook, and then delete the data in the old workbook.

References:

http://www.worldstart.com/cut-vs-copy-in-ms-excel/