This article introduces you to “Define Name” feature of excel with which you can give a name to any cell or range of cells and then just use that particular name in other formula’s like vlookup, offset, match etc without having to select it manually every time.
Naming cells comes in very handy when you need to use some cell or range of cells lots of times in your formulas. In functions like vlookup, match, offset etc you have to give the range, so instead of choosing the range manually all the time you can give a name to your data.For e.g. you have named some range as “List” then when you are using the vlookup function then in your formula you can refer to that range as:
=VLOOKUP(E3,List,2,FALSE) as shown in the diagram below.
To name a cell or a range of cells, we can use the following two methods:
Using the Name box:
Just select the cell or range of cells.Then just type the name in the Name box and hit Enter. In the diagram below, list refers to the range A1:B14.
Using the Define Name Feature
Select the cell or range of cells.From Insert menu, choose Name - Define
Type a name and hit enter.
Using the Define Name dialog, you can change the range that a name refers to, or delete a name.
Naming a cell can be very useful when you have lots of tabs in your spreadsheet and you frequently visit particular sections of some tabs then if you have named the data in those tabs you can simply type in the name in the name box and hit enter and it will take you to that tab in a second as the name box stores all the existing names.
Also, when you use names in your formulas, you don’t have to remember all the names. So when you are in midst of typing a formula and you wish to enter some already defined names then just hit F3 to get the Paste Name box and simply select the name you want to use in your formula and hit OK.
Although naming a cell is very handy but it has disadvantages too. If you named some range or cell and later on you deleted the tab in which it existed then in your define dialog box you will still see the name but you will notice it no longer refers to that range but gives a reference error. Lots of such broken links can slow down excel immensely.
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