I have a file recording magazine issues. Each block of 12 (1per year) contains the year number (such as 1992) in column1 (General format - changing it to Date format won't work, and changing it to Number format makes no difference) and the month name in column 2, viz:
| 1992 | Jan | |
| 1992 | Feb | Jill Bauman |
| 1992 | Mar | Ron Walotsky |
| 1992 | Apr | |
| 1992 | May | David Hardy |
| 1992 | Jun | |
| 1992 | Jul | Bryn Barnard |
| 1992 | Aug |
| 1992 | Sept |
| 1992 | Oct | |
| 1992 | Nov | |
| 1992 | Dec | |
I wish to name column1 row 1 "Jan92", and row 12 "Dec92" (exact spelling). So I select that cell, which highlights and its location (A1) is displayed in the upper left space). I go to that space and overtype the "A1" which appears there with "Jan92" (exact spelling). The name is not accepted - it is converted into all uppercase letters (JAN92) and the display cycles to highlight Column JAN, row 92 , ie a location in the file (even though the file is nowhere near that wide). I have discovered that I can overcome this by preceding the name with an Underscore (_) character, but this strikes me as unnecessarily tedious and a bit of a cop-out by the developers of Excel. Aside from that though, I have to commend those same developers for what is truly an awesome and incredible piece of software.
