Jacob asked us if he could reference a whole cell range by label in excel. He continued on with how much easier it would make his life. Jacob today’s your lucky day because it looks like you can!

Thanks to LifeHacker for the answer to this one. You can reference a column by its header or label. This is wonderful and had more than a few of my end users jumping for joy! It works in OpenOffice as well as most Pc versions and on the Mac!

While you’re writing formulas in Excel, you can refer to cell ranges not only by hard-to-read row and column numbers and letters but by label. So instead of totaling a column using =SUM(B2:B5), you can write the formula =SUM(‘Widgets Cranked’). After I mentioned this is a nice feature in Apple’s new spreadsheet application Numbers ’08, reader Dustin pointed out that it’s available in Excel as well, just not turned on by default. To enable it, in the Tools>Options dialog, the Calculation tab, check off “Accept labels in formulas.” Thanks, Dustin![Via LifeHacker]