"z.entropic" wrote...
... but please be forewarned that INDIRECT.EXT from MOREFUNC slows down
the Excel incredibly, . . .
....

Not nearly as much as my pull(..) udf would!

. . . I wish the next version of Excel could use INDIRECT with closed
worksheets; what's the big problem here?

Purely syntactic. INDIRECT only returns range references, and ranges can
only exist (as instantiative Range objects) in open workbooks. Either
Excel's developers would either need to expand the definition of the Range
class to encompass aggregations of cells in closed workbooks as ranges, or
they'd have to change the syntax of INDIRECT so that it could return range
references to ranges in open workbooks or arrays of values of referenced
cells in closed workbooks. The latter is more likely, but twice or even 100
times infinitesimal is still pretty unlikely.