Another Excel thread - stop spreadsheets from updating

I have an Excel 2003 spreadsheet that is linked to five other spreadsheets, and everytime it is opened Excel asks if it should be updated, which is OK since I linked it to these other files. Basically, this is a sheet that calculates the salary of each of our employees, and it changes every workday as data from the other five sheets are changed. However, at the end of every payperiod the updates must be stopped so that the sheet is no longer updated. If the payroll sheet is accidentally updated after that the period ends, it causes all sorts of problems with recordkeeping, primarily with the IRS.

Is there any short way to stop the updating after the end date of a period? I know the usual methods, but they are cumbersome and easy to miss. What I need is a hopefully simple method, preferable using one command, that will stop any updating.

I went to Excel’s help function, and they cover this situation. Unfortunately, their procedure is incomprehensible (at least to me) and involves things like “document workspaces” of which I don’t have a clue of what that is. Searching in the help function for “document workspaces” bring up some more incomprehensible stuff that is of no use to me.

Any advice you Excel experts can come up with will be much appreciated.

Can’t you go into Edit | Links, select all the links in the list and click on Break?

(From memory: I don’t have Excel 2003 anymore.)

How many worksheets are in this file? You could Copy and Paste Values (three keystrokes) to freeze the values.

I know of no way to simply “turn it off.”

Maybe I’m not fully understanding your question, but can’t you simply go into File -> Options -> Formulas and switch it to Manual calculation?

That worked!

It’s rather annoying - I searched all thru the help files and found nothing about that very simple solution.

Thanks to everybody who answered.

I’m beginning to think that if somebody posted a thread entitled “How to solve all the Middle East problems”, some Doper would have the answer in about three minutes.

The quick answer to that is “Send Hula Hoops”, but why that works takes a lot longer to explain.

Marmite is the answer