How to disable Excel's automatic cell reference change after copy/paste?

Question

I\'ve got a massive Excel 2003 spreadsheet I\'m working on. There are a lot of very large formulas with a lot of cell references. Here\'s a simple example.

=         


        

Answer 1

A very simple solution is to select the range you wish to copy, then Find and Replace (Ctrl + h), changing = to another symbol that is not used in your formula (e.g. #) - thus stopping it from being an active formula.

Then, copy and paste the selected range to it's new location.

Finally, Find and Replace to change # back to = in both the original and new range, thus restoring both ranges to being formulae again.