Office 2011 Excel Incompatibility across network - Links Breaking!

I could really use some help. I am on a network where I am the only Mac user. We use Excel a lot. I have many links to cells in other workbooks that need to be updated all the time, and other users share these files. When I add a link in one of my files and save it using Excel for Mac 2011, a Windows Excel 2010 user must reestablish the link location because my Mac is saving the path in a Mac-specific format.

In other words, when I save something as //CDI/User. The Windows machine sees it as //CDI/Volumes/User. That breaks the link, since there is no folder called "Volumes".

I ran a compatibility report and this is what I get:
"macintosh-specific links to files might not work in excel for windows"

Is there a solution for this? My only other option, which I have been doing for a couple of years, is to run Win Office on my XP emulator. I dislike that greatly.

Thanks for any help!

 

Okay, found the issue and a fix. The issue is an incompatibility between mapped drives in Windows and UNC naming with Mac. Mac saves the path differently than Windows when using mapped drives (which we do). I found an article that detailed how Excel stores links based on file location and figured out that if I put all the files in the same folder, the link problem goes away, since Excel only saves the file name in that situation (rather than the whole path name). I tried that and it worked!

Thanks Scoob for your post. It was your comment about relative naming that helped me find what I needed.

 

Here it is...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328440