I want to cover something today that I use all of the time but seems to be understood in varying degrees by clients I work with. I am talking about use of the dollar sign ($) in an Excel formula.

Wherever you paste the formula, it always refers to column A, but the row changes to the current row. Single-Column References Excel provides an alternative method of referring to the cell in a specific column of the current row: by referring only to the column, leaving the row out of the reference. On my PC version of Excel I use this does not happen. The values just change based on the new data and the existing formulas. With the Mac version the formulas are being changed. I can sometimes resolve the issue by using paste special/values option. Looking for advice on how to resolve this issue, so the formulas do not change when cutting.

Relative cell references When you copy and paste an Excel formula from one cell to another, the cell references change, relative to the new position: EXAMPLE: If we have the very simple formula '=A1' in cell B1 it will change as follows when copied and pasted: Pasted to B2, it becomes '=A2' Pasted to C2, it becomes '=B2' Pasted to A2, it returns an error! In each case it is changing the reference to refer to the cell one to the left on the same row as the cell that the formula is in, i.e. The same relative position that A1 was to the original formula.

The reason an error is returned when it is pasted into column A, is because there are no columns to the left of column A. This behaviour is very useful and is what allows a sum to be copied across or down the page and automatically refer to the new column or row that it finds itself in. But in some situations, you want some or all of the references to remain fixed when they are copied elsewhere. The dollar sign ($) This is where the dollar sign is used.

EXAMPLE: Take an example where you have a column of Sales values in Pounds Sterling in column A and a formula to convert these into US Dollars in column B. For some reason my mac excel sheet has two pages. You could enter the actual exchange rate into the formula but it would be more sensible to refer to a cell where the exchange rate is held, so that it can be updated whenever it is needed. The simple formula for cell B2, would be '=A2*E1', however if you copy this down, then the formula in cell B3, would read '=A3*E2' as both references would move down a row as described above. This is where the dollar sign ($) is used.

The dollar sign allows you to fix either the row, the column or both on any cell reference, by preceding the column or row with the dollar sign. In our example if we replace the formula in cell B2 with '=A2*$E$1', then both the 'E' and the '1' will remain fixed when the formula is copied.