Forum Discussion
Technical Question: Is a Range argument passed to SUM as a Reference or an Evaluated Array?
- Mar 12, 2026
I suspect you need a member of the development team to know for sure or, otherwise someone like Charles Williams who regularly codes in conjunction with Excel. My expectation is that the range A1:B5 remains as a reference until you take some action to force it to convert. For example
= SUM(0+$E$5:$F$16 $D$8:$G$11)
still performs the array intersection before the summation. OFFSET will also pass overlapping range references around if required to do so.
I suspect you need a member of the development team to know for sure or, otherwise someone like Charles Williams who regularly codes in conjunction with Excel. My expectation is that the range A1:B5 remains as a reference until you take some action to force it to convert. For example
= SUM(0+$E$5:$F$16 $D$8:$G$11)
still performs the array intersection before the summation. OFFSET will also pass overlapping range references around if required to do so.