LO Calc: batch update of linkED files automagically

Hello! I couldn’t find a solution out there on the internet so here I am.

First of all, a very big thank you to LO’s development and support team.
In second place, I am not familiar to accountability jargon so I’ll try to express myself as clearly as I can. Feel free to ask about anything I can’t express correctly.

I have an accountability record that has 13 workbooks: 1 for each month and 1 that works as a Reporting Workbook.
This Reporting Workbook reads from the other twelve workbooks and to calculate the year balance I need read from December workbook. And each month reads from the previous month and provides to the following month. Now we are in June so the following month’s workbooks are empty. So to have the Reporting Workbook updated, I have to open each following workbook, click on update or press F9, save it, and so on…

I was wondering if there’s a way (configuration on a per file basis or plugin or whatever… even writing some code) to have all linked workbooks updated when I open a single one.of this group? I can’t avoid reading December’s workbook to get update info and need December and all the others updated so I can see real numbers while keeping formulas as simpler and not excessively linked and try to keep the number of “helper cells” at the minimum.

I hope I had expressed myself clearly.

Thanks in advance.

PD: LO version: 5.2.7.2

I understood that it has 13 interconnected files. These files could be in a file and each month be a spreadsheet, or there is something that prevents it.

Technically there’s nothing that prevents it. The Reporting Workbook already has several spreadsheets and I’m not keen on having neverending spreadsheets. Even though, that way will make formulas simpler and solve this. However, I would like to know if there’s a way to achieve what I want with the minimum effort as I consider this issue as elemental functionality.

Some here will think this use-case to be a good example to use another “elemental functionality” named Base to hold all your data. Using queries will make your formulas even easier - after you managed to learn some sql (or got help with the first steps).

As you asked for some examples to start, I’d recommend the guide for Base first. Available from the section “get help> Documentation” of LibreOffice.org
English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides

More examples are at the developers-page of the german guide available:

If you prefer video as first introduction,
there is for example this series on Base:

I can’t comment on the quality of the videos, as I used another channel in german language and have often recommended #5 for approaching to use filter-tables.

Thanks for your time. I’m a MySQL user so I created a database in MySQL, linked it to Base so I can access it from Calc. I decided this way because I will also need to access this data from different apps. Now I’m stuck on how to use SQL queries in Calc to fill form controls. I guess I will have to open a new question…

Start with something simple: Key (EDIT:) Shift+Ctrl+F4 opens the overview of registered Datasources. Select a database, then one of your queries and drag the query to your sheet A1. You get the result of the query in your sheet. To refresh (repeat query), there is an entry in the menu data.