Data Migration Disaster: How to Find Broken Links in Excel

How to Avoid a Major Cause of Data Loss in Excel

Ever had one of your users open an Excel spreadsheet and notice something was missing? Data missing from a cell (or lots of cells)? Missing graphs? Missing account numbers? Missing totals? Worse yet, incorrect totals? As you know, these are just some of the symptoms of broken file links. Happens all the time.

But do you know how to find broken links in Excel?

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Data Migrations Are Sure to Break Links

Know what else happens all the time? Data migrations and file system changes. These cause lost data due to broken file links. Imagine thousands of spreadsheets with missing customer account data or important analysis data. Think some end users and company execs might be calling you in a slightly bad mood?

Data migration and file system restructuring are good things. Your organization may be moving to the Cloud or upgrading to a new server system or archiving data. These can lead to faster operations, decreased costs and possibly a pay raise for you (the IT pro). It’s just that such projects usually come with that pesky liability (which reduces the likelihood of that pay raise).

LinkFixer Advanced

Protects your good links and fixes your broken links — automatically!

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Protecting Your Data

LinkFixer Advanced™ supports Microsoft Excel (along with many other types of files), allowing for the automatic reporting, maintenance and repair of links contained within spreadsheets. It can support thousands of files on your personal PC or millions of files when you’re performing a complex migration over all your networks.

LinkFixer Advanced will protect even the most complex links you use, such as links contained in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro code that point to external files. Additionally, LinkFixer Advanced can protect and repair dozens of other of the most popular file types such as, Microsoft Word, Access, PowerPoint, InDesign, HTML, AutoCAD and many others. For a complete list of file types, visit the main LinkFixer Advanced page by clicking here.

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Preventing Excel Data Loss

One way you can use LinkFixer Advanced would be to use it to do your migration or folder system changes. With the Move/Rename tool, you can quickly move and rename batches of parent files and all of their child files, with LinkFixer Advanced automatically handling all the links for you so that they do not break in the process. That way, you won’t have to worry about any broken links related to your Excel files (or almost any other files too, for that matter). Move and/or rename thousands of files and folders at the same time without a single break.

But what if you have to use a certain application for your data migration?

Even if you don’t use LinkFixer Advanced to do the actual migration, it can still handle your links for you. Read the next section below.

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Advanced Automatic Link Protection and Repair

If you prefer to use your own migration tool (or a commercial application) to restructure data or move it, LinkFixer Advanced can still take care of all your links for you. In this case, you would just use a different set of functions. The patented link protection option serves kinda like a backup (for your links) and uses two steps:

Inoculate: The term “inoculate” means to prepare and protect. The inoculation process sets up your files and links so they can be automatically restored after your migration. This is accomplished by creating an additional association (sometimes referred to as a “super link”) between parent files and each of their child files. This ensures all your file links can be repaired automatically, because the “super link” isn’t lost with any moving or renaming of any files, folders or drives.

Cure: Data migration and repairing Excel links are simplified, taking hundreds, if not thousands, of fewer man-hours when you use our Cure function. LinkFixer Advanced will automatically select and fix broken Excel links, all with just a few mouse clicks. Once you have inoculated a set of files, fixing broken links in Excel after data migration has never been easier.

How easy is this?

  1. Run the LinkFixer Advanced Inoculate tool on the drives/folders/files you are about to migrate.
  2. Migrate, rename and restructure your files and folders all over your system to your heart’s content, using whatever applications you like.
  3. Run the LinkFixer Advanced Cure tool. It cleans up all the link damage done during the migration, saving you from lost data, downtime and upset users and bosses. To see how LinkFixer Advanced can make your life simpler, click here for video demonstrations.
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Take Control of the Excel File Links Referencing Other Files

Using LinkFixer Advanced, you can protect or adjust hyperlinks, object links and "paste special" links. LinkFixer Advanced performs direct binary file access to links in Excel files providing significant benefits including:

  • Fast processing speeds.
  • Ability to process Excel links contained within protected cells and spreadsheets.
  • Ability to bypass problematic user-defined macros that could otherwise hinder processing speed.
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If You’ve Already Migrated:

How to Have Broken Links Corrected Fast

Did you already do a migration and now have about a million messed up links and files? Don’t give it a second thought. “We have an app for that.” More correctly, LinkFixer Advanced has a tool that handles this situation too. The Modify Links feature gives you the ability to create custom renaming rules to modify the content of the links contained in all of your parent files. Tell the program what you want replaced with what, and click “Run”. LinkFixer Advanced will make all the changes for you in batch and super fast — preventing link data loss across all Excel files. What’s more, it actually can do this on all of today’s most common file types (Word, Access, PowerPoint, Visio, PDF, InDesign, HTML, AutoCAD and on and on).

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Detailed Link Reporting

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In addition to fixing broken links in Excel after data migration, LinkFixer Advanced can easily create a variety of detailed reports showing all the links within your Microsoft Excel files. Support includes broken link reports that will help you easily identify and fix any links that are not working — you avoid data loss, and it’s a big win for the team.

The reporting function allows you to identify, quantify and qualify links in Excel files so you can perform a risk analysis prior to using our tools to automatically repair broken Excel links.

LinkFixer Advanced can create a variety of detailed reports to help you discover any links that are not working properly or to simply track the movements that have already been made. To make analysis and risk management easier on you, reports can be exported in HTML or CSV (Comma Separated Value) formats.

LinkFixer Advanced Offers You the Tools to Prevent and Correct Broken Excel Links

LinkFixer Advanced offers you multiple options to manage Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Office documents as well as numerous file types. For more details on other supported file formats, call us today at (727) 442-1822.

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