Forum Discussion
Cell Range Delimiter
I used to be able to use a period to specify a cell range in a formula, e.g. -- =sum(a1.a5). This formula now gives a #FIELD! error. It seems that Excel will only accept a colon (:) now to separate ...
Hi Bob,
I never knew about this trick before, but it's a really cool trick!
I am using Excel 2019, and I can use it.
You can select the starting cell, then type the period (.) to allow you to expand the range using just one arrow!
And after entering the formula, the period (.) becomes colon (:).
It seems that this feature has been broken or overwritten in Excel 365 because of the new data types in Excel (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-data-types-stocks-and-geography-61a33056-9935-484f-8ac8-f1a89e210877) which comes with the new error type https://support.office.com/en-us/article/-field-error-66b3a5db-1904-41aa-9913-51ded9dd15f2.
- As a very old Lotus 123 user, I suspect that this was part of the Lotus compatibility.
