1.6 Flexible Named Ranges

Named ranges are flexible regarding the range of data that can be passed to them. Often, when you initially create a name, you may not know how many rows you may need to include in the named range. Consider the following example where you have some initial data but anticipate adding more data as time passes.

It would be nice to create a named range for Sales and for the Cost of Goods Sold (CofGS), but you don’t know where your range will end. In this example, we can get away with simply using the range of D:D for our sales by first clicking on column D and defining a new name. Similarly, we can define a name for Cost of Goods Sold using column E.

This works fine in this example; however, as you will see in the lesson on charts, this simplistic approach won’t work in all scenarios. Sometimes we may need to create more sophisticated, dynamic named ranges based on the values we find in the column. We’ll keep it simple here, but we hope you recognize that named ranges are very powerful and can be used to create dynamic and changing ranges.