I have a UDF that works fine and have distributed it to students on an add-in.
It is of the form fun(one as variant, two as variant) as variant
Now I find that some students do a very clever thing. They are working on
financial tables and name the rows with names like sales, cost, and profit.
Then, to calculate profit they simply enter =sales - cost. Copy the formula
to the right to the other columns and it looks the same, but it actually
grabs the right values of sales and cost in each column. I don't see this
documented, but type sales in any column and your will get the figure out of
the sales row for that column.
My problem is that my UDF will not accept this kind of argument. The work
around is simply to write FUN( rate, 0+sales), forcing Excel to convert the
sales reference to a specific number before calling the function.
Is there a way to avoid this work around? And, what is the name of this
strange referencing method my students are using?