Named Ranges in Excel — and New Excel Formulas Training 🎉

If you have been a long-time subscriber, you might remember me mentioning Named Ranges in Excel a long time ago. Using your Name Box to generate Named Ranges can make it so much easier to navigate through a workbook that contains many sheets and will help you more easily build 3D functions and formulas more easily across sheets.

With Excel dashboards being all the rage lately, I thought it would be the perfect time to revisit the incredibly useful, and incredibly understated, functionality of named ranges. Also, I wanted to give you a special preview of a new Excel training session you have access to in myTraining. Let’s take a look!

About Named Ranges in Excel

Most people primarily use Excel’s Name Box (this box that lives to the left of your formula bar) to identify cell location, but there is much more utility here than you may realize.

Name box

For instance, you can name cells, or a series of cells, yourself, making them easier to access, like in this example of a workbook with two named ranges I can easily jump to by using the name box. So, the first advantage is named ranges make your workbooks easier to navigate.

Even more useful is the ability to reference named ranges within a formula, preventing the need to click around between sheets, potentially selecting incorrect data in the process, as you are completing your function arguments.

This formula, for instance, references an entire column on another sheet:

Here is a formula referencing two named ranges from other sheets in the workbook:

two named ranges in a function

Named Ranges Video

I wanted you to see these in action, so I am sharing a new video with you that shows you named ranges in more detail. This video is actually a portion of a lesson within the new Excel Advanced Formulas: Part 2 training.

If this video piques your interest, the full course is now (just today!) available to faculty and staff in myTraining. I would love to hear what you think!

Note: if the contents of the video appear too small in this embedded view, click on the video title to expand.

Excel Training Available

✨Visit myTraining to sign up for live Excel sessions, including:

  • Excel Essentials
  • Excel PivotTables and Charts
  • Excel Advanced Formulas

✨And asynchronous Excel sessions, including:

  • Excel Advanced Formulas, Part 2 (where named ranges appear)
  • Excel 365: New Functions

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