Importing a range of data from a closed workbook

[sigfreid]

Hi,

Due to some cutbacks the company I work for has taken away the database system we used to use to record debts owed to us, so I'm building one in excel (no access or sql otherwise I'd use those). We have all the debt in seperate workbooks by financial period and I'm creating a new workbook that will upon entering of a specific financial period will pull information from the pertaining workbook and report on the information.

I have a Formula

=INDIRECT.EXT(CONCATENATE("'C:\Documents and Settings\hughel13\My Documents\[",Reports!$C$11,".xls]Sheet1'!R2:R138"))

Among others which pull other ranges

Which as I understand should work just fine on a closed workbook, however it only works when the target workbook is open.
When the workbook is closed the formula only pulls the first value in the range.

On a related note the above formula and it's counterparts are autofilled down the page from 2 to 1000 as some of the workbooks have 1000 records to pull, however the ones that dont have that many, cause errors when the data is pulled, is there a way to make it so that if the cell it's pulling from is empty it doesn't pull from it or pulls a value of 0?

Any ideas?