I am trying to identify all cells that contain external workbook references, using openpyxl in Python 3.4. But I am failing. My first try consisted of:

def find_external_value(cell):
# identifies an external link in a given cellif '.xls' in cell.value:has_external_reference = Truereturn has_external_value

However, when I print the cell values that have external values to the console, it yields this:

=[1]Sheet1!$B$4
=[2]Sheet1!$B$4

So, openpyxl obviously does not parse formulas containing external values in the way I imagined and since square brackets are used for table formulas, there is no sense in trying to pick up on external links in this manner.

I dug a little deeper and found the detect_external_links function in the openpyxl.workbook.names.external module (reference). I have no idea if one can actually call this function to do what I want.

From the console results it seems as if openpyxl understands that there are references, and seems to contain them in a list of sorts. But can one access this list? Or detect if such a list exists?

Whichever way - all I need is to figure out if a cell contains a link to an external workbook.

I have found a solution to this. Use the openpyxl library for load the xlsx file as

import openpyxl
wb=openpyxl.load_workbook("Myworkbook.xlsx")"""len(wb._external_links)        *Add this line to get count of linked workbooks*"""items=wb._external_links
for index, item in enumerate(items):Mystr =wb._external_links[index].file_link.TargetMystr=Mystr.replace("file:///","")print(Mystr.replace("%20"," "))----------------------------
Out[01]: ##Indicates that the workbook has 4 external workbook links##
/Users/myohannan/AppData/Local/Temp/49/orion/Extension Workpapers_Learning Extension Calc W_83180610.xlsx
/Users/lmmeyer/AppData/Local/Temp/orion/Complete Set of Workpapers_PPS Workpapers 123112_111698213.xlsx
\\SF-DATA-2\IBData\TEMP\ie5\Temporary Internet Files\OLK8A\LBO Models\PIGLET Current.xls
/WINNT/Temporary Internet Files/OLK3/WINDOWS/Temporary Internet Files/OLK8304/DEZ.XLS