Thanks, but there's no problem getting it to work when the name refers to a
range, but I need to use a name that refers to a formula. See my answer to
Stefi ...

/naffats

"Joel" wrote:

I works for me in 2003. I added an equal sign in front of the named range in
the source box for the data validation and set the option in the allow box to
List

"naffats" wrote:

Hi, I'm having a problem with a complex validation, where the combined length
of the formulas got longer than 256 character, which seems to be the limit on
the Custom formula field under Validation in Excel 2003 (also when doing
conditional formatting?).

For various reasons (mostly related to users), I can't use the obvious
workrounds with a separate cell with the validation test, and I can't put any
macros into the spreadsheet.

So I thought, why not use Named formulas? Alas, this doesn't seem to work,
or at least not the way I expect.

Small example:
define the name Test and make it refer to "=$A$11".
set custom validation on cell $A$1 to "=Test".

Now I expect a warning on the value '0' in cell $A$1, but actually anything
goes.

Am I missing something?
Is there any other way around the size limit on validation formulas, that
does not involve macros or extra cells/sheets?

Cheers /naffats