For several years I have used a spreadsheet to balance my checkbook and provide YTD totals by category for a span of the previous 5 years. Each year is a separate workbook and each total is accomplished by an external link to the annual worksheet for that year and the monthly sheet within that workbook An example would be ='C:\Documents and Settings\Greentree\My Documents\[CheckLog 2004.xls]January'!$L8. My problem is that it becomes fairly labor intensive to roll all of these formulas forward each year. It would be much easier if I could replace the file name year (in this case CheckLog 2004.xls) with a variable such as =TEXT(YEAR($A$1),"####")-1, where year is current year. I have experimented on several occasions but can't seem to get the punctuation right to make it work. I would be most grateful to anyone who can provide some assistance........