What Is a Range?

When you select a group of cells (which you have done numerous times in the various Excel lessons), you are in fact selecting a range. A cell range can consist of one cell or any group of contiguous cells.

Ranges are referred to by their anchor points (the upper-left corner and the lower-right corner). For example, a range that begins with cell C10 and ends with I14 is referred to as C10:I14.

Range A group of contiguous cells in an Excel worksheet.

Selecting ranges is certainly not rocket science, but you can do a number of things with a selected range of cells. For example, you can select a range of cells and print them (rather than printing the entire worksheet). You can also name ranges, which makes it much easier to include the cell range in a formula or function (you learn about range names and using range names in formulas later in this lesson). A few tricks for selecting cell ranges are discussed in the next section.