Advantages to Naming Cells and Ranges

Using names for cells and ranges offers the following advantages:

• A meaningful range name (such as Income) is much easier to remember than a range address (such as A1:A21).
• After you select a named cell or range, its name appears in the name box.
• You can quickly move to a named area of your worksheet by choosing a name in the name box.
• Creating formulas is easier, because you can paste a cell or range name into a formula.
• Names make your formulas more understandable and easier to use. For example, =Income-Taxes is more intuitive than =D20-D40.

Although Excel is flexible about the names that you can define, it does have the following rules:

• Names must begin with a letter or the underscore character (_).
• Names can't contain any spaces. You may want to use an underscore or a period character to simulate a space (such as Annual_Total or Annual.Total).
• You can use any combination of letters and numbers, but the name must not begin with a number (such as 3rdQuarter) or look like a cell reference (such as Q3).
• You can't use most symbols. You can, however, use the underscore (_), period (.), backslash (\), and question mark (?).
• Names can be no more than 255 characters long.