title: Script workaround to solve importRange problems for drop down list
body: <p>I am sharing this with hopes I workaround solution to this problem I am facing. 
  I am using data validation to get values of a drop down menu. The values come from Range(“A1:A40”) in a sheet I called “calculation”</p>
  
  <p>Since I have about 50 spreadsheets that use the same drop down values and same pattern, I simply decided to use an importRange function to fill the information in Sheet(“Calculation”).Range(“A1:A50”). The importRange was taking the list from a separate spreadsheet that I dedicated for that purpose. </p>
  
  <p>The purpose of doing that was simply because this is a list of categories that I want to update and change, and I want the drop down menu to take into consideration these changes without have to manually change the values in the 50+ spreadsheets.</p>
  
  <p>Now theoretically this would work with no problem , but the importRange function is so temperamental and it shows a #REF error that happens with random spreadsheets. I saw posts with complains from the same problem so I gave up hope the importRange would be a viable solution.</p>
  
  <p>I would like your opinion in a good workaround to avoid such problem. </p>
  
  <p>One solution I thought of is to have a script copying values from one sheet to all these sheets and have this script work every day but I did not know how to copy entire range from one spreadsheet to another, and frankly I am not sure if this solution is the best. </p>
  
  <p>My experience working with cross-spreadsheet scripts is that a script getting data from couple of cells in 50+ sheets would probably take more than 5 minutes and eventually stop for exceeding the time allowed.</p>