Crystal Reports

Can anyone help?
Trying to create an OBDC link within administrator for EXcel files, and specific Excel files.
These will be used as a data source for external data.
Once the OBDC link created I am attempting to connect to the specific file using Crystal reports.
It recognises the overall link but cannot see the Excel file.
Having followed numerous versions of instructions I am now at a loss as to what is going wrong.
However, I experimented by creating a named Range within Excel which encapsulated the data needed to be read. Crystal then could see the data using the OBDC link.
I have been told though that i should not need to do this and the OBDC link should be enough.
Does anyone have a definitive on this?
Cheers