Authoritative Excel range syntax reference

Question

Sorry if this has been asked before but I can\'t find it. I am looking for an authoritative description of all valid strings that can be used as a reference, e.g., \"A1:C5\", \"

Answer 1

The problem is that there are a variety of operators (Range, Intersect, implicit intersect etc ), functions (INDEX, OFFSET, CHOOSE, INDIRECT + user-defined functions), Defined Names and structured Table references etc that can all be de-referenced to provide a valid range reference. So to do a complete job means parsing arbitrary Excel formulae. And it also varies by Excel version.

If all you want to do is work with standard explicit range references the usual trick is to convert the string to R1C1 notation and work with that. The syntax for R1C1 references is reasonably well described in Excel documentation.

There is also a BNF description of Excel formulae available somewhere but I have mislaid the reference.