How to Stop Microsoft Excel from Automatically Updating Linked Workbooks When Opened

If you work with complex financial models or large corporate datasets, you likely use Excel workbooks that pull data from other linked spreadsheet files. By default, whenever you open a “destination” workbook, Excel immediately attempts to connect to the “source” workbooks to refresh the data. While this ensures your numbers are always up to date, it can cause the file to take an agonizingly long time to load, especially if the source files are stored on a slow network drive.

If you prefer to review the historical data first and manually trigger the update when you are ready, you can configure Excel to stop automatically updating external links upon opening.

How to Turn Off Automatic Link Updates (Per Workbook)

You can change the update behavior for individual workbooks using the Edit Links menu.

1. Open the Excel workbook containing the external links.
2. Click on the Data tab in the ribbon at the top of the screen.
3. In the “Queries & Connections” group, click on Edit Links. (If this button is greyed out, your workbook does not contain any external links).
4. In the Edit Links dialog box, click the Startup Prompt… button at the bottom left.
5. You will be presented with three options. Select the third option: Don’t display the alert and don’t update automatic links.
6. Click OK, then close the Edit Links window.
7. Save your workbook.

The next time you open this specific file, it will load instantly using the cached data from the last time it was saved.

How to Turn Off the Update Prompt Globally

If you want to stop Excel from constantly throwing security warnings and asking you if you want to update links across all your files, you can change a global setting in the Trust Center.

1. Click File > Options.
2. Select Advanced from the left sidebar.
3. Scroll down to the General section.
4. Uncheck the box labeled Ask to update automatic links.
5. Click OK.

With this unchecked, Excel will silently update the links in the background without prompting you. If you combine this global setting with the per-workbook setting above, you achieve complete control over when and how your data refreshes.