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nikiband's avatar
nikiband
New member | Level 2
3 years ago
Solved

Is there a way of getting rid of your username in the dropbox link?

My team works in Excel quite often and we link cells from one dropbox excel file to another. The issue is that, when we link the cells, it is linked to a specific user so if someone else goes into th...
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  • Rich's avatar
    Rich
    3 years ago
    nikiband wrote:

    My team works in Excel quite often and we link cells from one dropbox excel file to another. The issue is that, when we link the cells, it is linked to a specific user so if someone else goes into the file, they are not able to refresh the formulas without there being a bunch of #REF errors.

    This isn't a Dropbox issue. The problem you're experiencing is caused by Excel (and most applications) using the full path in the links to other cells, sheets, files, etc. The "username" that you're seeing is actually the name of the user's Windows profile folder, which is usually where Dropbox is stored by default.

     

    You may be able to get around this by changing all of your links to use an environment variable, but you'd need a bit of Visual Basic code as well since Excel can't directly access environment variables. Take a look at the following discussion.

     

    In that discussion they're referring to a linked image, but I imagine the process would work for a link to another cell/sheet as well.

Rich's avatar
Rich
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
3 years ago
nikiband wrote:

My team works in Excel quite often and we link cells from one dropbox excel file to another. The issue is that, when we link the cells, it is linked to a specific user so if someone else goes into the file, they are not able to refresh the formulas without there being a bunch of #REF errors.

This isn't a Dropbox issue. The problem you're experiencing is caused by Excel (and most applications) using the full path in the links to other cells, sheets, files, etc. The "username" that you're seeing is actually the name of the user's Windows profile folder, which is usually where Dropbox is stored by default.

 

You may be able to get around this by changing all of your links to use an environment variable, but you'd need a bit of Visual Basic code as well since Excel can't directly access environment variables. Take a look at the following discussion.

 

In that discussion they're referring to a linked image, but I imagine the process would work for a link to another cell/sheet as well.

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