Excel Reference To Current Cell

Question

How do I obtain a reference to the current cell?

For example, if I want to display the width of column A, I could use the following:

=CELL("width", A2)

However, I want the formula to be something like this:

=CELL("width", THIS_CELL)

Answer 1

There is a better way that is safer and will not slow down your application. How Excel is set up, a cell can have either a value or a formula; the formula can not refer to its own cell. You end up with an infinite loop, since the new value would cause another calculation... . Use a helper column to calculate the value based on what you put in the other cell. For Example:

Column A is a True or False, Column B contains a monetary value, Column C contains the folowing formula: =B1

Now, to calculate that column B will be highlighted yellow in a conditional format only if Column A is True and Column B is greater than Zero...

=AND(A1=True,C1>0)

You can then choose to hide column C

Answer 2

=ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN())
=ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN(),1)
=ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN(),2)
=ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN(),3)
=ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN(),4)

Answer 3

EDIT: the following is wrong, because Cell("width") returns the width of the last modified cell.

Cell("width") returns the width of the current cell, so you don't need a reference to the current cell. If you need one, though, cell("address") returns the address of the current cell, so if you need a reference to the current cell, use indirect(cell("address")). See the documentation: http://www.techonthenet.com/excel/formulas/cell.php

Answer 4

A2 is already a relative reference and will change when you move the cell or copy the formula.

Answer 5

Without INDIRECT(): =CELL("width", OFFSET($A$1,ROW()-1,COLUMN()-1) )

Answer 6

Inside tables you can use [@] which (unfortunately) Excel automatically expands to Table1[@] but it does work. (I'm using Excel 2010)

For example when having two columns [Change] and [Balance], putting this in the [Balance] column:

=OFFSET([@], -1, 0) + [Change]

Note of course that this depends on the order of the rows (just like most any other solution), so it's a bit fragile.