Forum Discussion
Non-Consecutive Cell Referencing
Thank you also for your help. I will stick to your proposal for the reasons you give. But I will play around with all suggestions just to get an idea of how and why these functions work. Have a Merry Xmas!
Nobody has yet asked a question that I wanted to ask from the start: Why?
You don't have to answer, of course; may even view it as an impertinent question: what business is it of mine to question your question?!
But I am curious. It's an unusual request, and seems like a strange task. In general I'm a person who likes to keep rows and columns filled, not have blank rows or columns between sets of data, yet here you're going to lengths to create blank rows! So you've piqued my curiosity.
Are you willing to share the purpose? How you'll be filling or using those newly created blank rows?
Of course.
I have students under my clinical supervision at a university dental school. The 2025 patients have unfinished treatment and I have worked my way through 90 patients that will be returning, and making notes for the incoming class of 2026.Rather than present the info as 1 row at a time (ID, Last_Name, First_Name, Title, Last_Treatment, ..., it would be more efficient to compile it into something I can print onto a perforated A4 sheet (3 per sheet) so they can tear off each patient and get going. It will create much less confusion, and the patients won't have their time wasted.
So, it's not an Excel numerical problem, but just a text rearrangement, hence the spaces. It would not have been feasible in Word, because the Orig sheet has many other columns as I tracked the patients over 2025.
OK. So basically, at least as far as this particular request is concerned, you're using Excel solely for its rows and columns, as a way to display text info in a nicely formatted or arrayed fashion. You're NOT using it for any calculations or database summarizations where something like Pivot Table might be useful.
Thanks for explaining it. Normally I would have considered something like this an abuse of Excel, but you've clearly chosen it over Word in this instance because you are integrating it with an associated sheet where you legitimately use Excel for tracking purposes.
as always, you have good questions and if they told us why the gaps or what will go in the gaps we might create a single array function to fill the whole column. But I'm assuming the intend to fill those gaps with something and hence why I specifically didn't use an array function to fill the whole column
