Are you tired of using meaningless cell references in your formulas? Do you want to use proper names in your formulas, which are more meaningful, self-explanatory, and understandable? Do you want to make your formulas look more professional and unique? Then welcome to our tutorial on named references.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to replace cell references with actual names, making your formulas more meaningful and understandable. By the end of this video, you’ll be able to create named references that enhance the clarity and professionalism of your Excel spreadsheets.
We have an Excel sheet containing financial data of two years. The first portion is an income statement showing the calculation of profit from revenues and expenses. Then we have a balance sheet containing assets, liabilities, and the equity of a firm. Finally, we have a list of some ratios that need to be calculated from the above data.
In Excel, when we calculate something, we typically use cell references, like B23. But why use cryptic cell references when you can use meaningful names like “Loans” instead? In today’s tutorial, we will learn how to use actual names instead of cell references, making your formulas more user-friendly.
To use actual names, we can define names using the Name Manager in the Formulas tab. It’s a smart tool that can automatically pick names from the cells on the left. However, in our case, we’ll have to define some names manually due to our specific data structure.
We’ll create two columns to the left of both years and combine titles in Column A with “Current” and “Previous” to make names like “Current Sales” and “Previous Sales.” This way, the names will still apply when years change.
Once we’ve defined our names, we can replace cell references in our formulas with these actual names, making our formulas more meaningful and understandable. This applies to various financial ratios, including current assets ratio, quick assets, debt equity ratio, return on assets, return on equity, gross profit margin, net profit margin, and assets turnover.
By using named references, your formulas become more professional and user-friendly. You can also format numbers to display decimal points as needed. Moreover, we can define a name for an entire range, such as 2023 and 2022, as “Current” and “Previous,” allowing us to perform operations on entire ranges using a single formula.
In this tutorial, we’ve shown you how to enhance the clarity and professionalism of your Excel spreadsheets by replacing cell references with meaningful names. With this knowledge, you can create more user-friendly and understandable formulas in your financial analysis. Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more tutorials and updates.
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