I work collaboratively on a large, but simple budget workbook, shared with an MS Excel user. Since I started using LO, there have been a lot of mysterious errors creeping into cell references in Formulae. While are some are due to human errors when adding/removing rows, I wondered if there is a problem with moving a file to and from between LO & Excel, with occasional editing in Google Sheets as well, when I use my Chromebook in a meeting?
Google Sheets is known to mess up some things if the file is downloaded from there, both in ODF .ods and OOXML .xlsx formats, with different errors though and not necessarily related to cell references, however it may result in such if a formula wasn’t a proper formula cell but a string instead and a “reference” (that wasn’t any) thus wasn’t adapted to inserted columns or rows. When exchanging documents between Calc and Excel there usually are no problems with cell references. Other than that, without details and sample documents it is impossible to say what problems you encounter.
Thanks. I’ll avoid going via Google Sheets. Would it also help to always save an Excel file into Open Doc (.ods) format before re-exporting as Excel?
As ODF is the native format it may help to save interim versions to .ods and work on those, before saving the final version as .xlsx