You would definitely need a macro for that.
And an exact description of whether you are
doing this one cell at time, whether you can
use multiple areas and do it all at once. How
persistent should the next starting point be.
Hopefully all you want in the formula is a reference
to a single cell which increments. Excel 2000
will treat multiple areas in the selection. Excel 95
will not. Don't know about Excel 97. This will not
be persistent, the A1 is hardcoded, so you would
restart each time you run the macro.
Sub PopulateAreas_A1()
dim i as long
dim cell as range
For each cell in selection
cell.formula = "=" & range("A1").offset(i,0).address(0,0)
i = i + 1
next cell
end sub
to test:
populate A1:A40 with data such as each cells own address.
=ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN(),4)
or using MarkCells macro from my join.htm webpage.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/join.htm#markcells
or place A1 into the cell A1 and fill down to A40.
select ranges B1:B5, C6:C10, D11:H11, E16
40
and run the macro.
Since the question obviously needs programming, and this
is not the programming newsgroup, I expect
you will need instructions to install / use a macro.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/getstarted.htm
Not what you asked for, but I think what Don may have
been thinking of is Chip Pearson's addition to context menu
to copy the same formula regardless of placement. You also
need code each time you bring up Excel see references.
Sub CopyFormula()
'Chip Pearson, microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions, 2000/05/02
'
http://google.com/groups?hl=en&newwindow=1&th=4831aec5cbe19367&rnum=1
'
http://google.com/groups?as_umsgid=OWeRetUjBHA.2212@tkmsftngp05
Dim x As New DataObject
x.SetText ActiveCell.Formula
x.PutInClipboard
End Sub