Dave, thank you! Opening the separate instance did the trick.

"lose my reference" - I was trying to say that the "selected" blinking,
dotted line around my copied cells was going away, becoming un-selected.

I appreciate the help.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

What does lose my reference to the selected rows mean?

Are you trying to copy 4 cells into one cell?

If you are, then my guess is that you had your workbooks open in separate
instances of excel. Not one instance of excel with both workbooks open in that
instance.

You can close one of the workbooks, then use:
windows start button|Run
excel
and file|open the second workbook

Now you have multiple instances open.

You can copy multiple cells from one instance and paste into the formula bar (or
within the cell if you edit directly in the cell).

But losing that reference kind of confuses me. If you lose the stuff in the
clipboard, you could be running a macro (or an event macro could be running
without your knowledge) that kills that clipboard.


fijiflyer wrote:

Ok, this sounds a little simple, but it's bothering me this morning.
Yesterday (all day) I worked with two workbooks; one had multiple rows of
calculated fields, in a format of:
A1
A2
A3
A4

I was able (yesterday) to select A1:A4, copy (Ctrl+C) then tab over to the
other workbook, select one cell (double click) and then paste the contents of
A1:A4 into that one cell. I did it all day.

This morning I opened the same files and it doesn't work; every time I
double click on the destination cell I loose my reference to the selected
rows. Is there an option somewhere that I'm missing?

Thanks!

--

Dave Peterson