Abbreviating a function

[bernhard_nickel]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel Hi All,

I'm using look-up tables to translate one kind of value into another, such as letter grades to numerical grades, and as part of the look-up procedure, I use expressions like this

=HLOOKUP(E5,LetterToNumber,2,FALSE)

That is, I'm using a function with four arguments, but three of these are always the same---I'm always using the same lookup table, here references as "LetterToNumber", and the other two arguments stay the same, as well.

It would really improve readability if I could somehow either define a new function, FOO that takes one argument, E5 in this example, and returns the same result as the explicit lookup function, of if I could just abbreviate this kind of function.

I understand that in previous versions of Excel, one could use VBA for this kind of thing, but I don't know how to do it in 2008.

Thanks a lot.
Bernhard.

 

[CyberTaz]

Are you actually using a Named Range for the Lookup Table? If so, that as
well as the last 2 arguments will not change if you simply copy an existing
instance of the expression & paste it to the new location.

The only thing that change are cell references. If you want them to remain
constant use Absolute References ($E$2:$H$20) rather than Relative (E2:H20)