Naming cells is a fantastic way to make your Excel worksheet work faster for you. In short, you use a name in lieu of a row and column reference. So for instance, let's say you had a date in cell A1 and you wanted to reference that. Normally you would say equals A1, whereas now if you've given it the name date, you can just say equals and type in the word date. It thus means you can create your formulas or functions much quicker.

It provides a better description of the contents and is thus much easier to remember where the date is. And you can easily reference cells that are far away or on different sheets.

There are a couple of rules that we should follow. First of all, it has to start with a letter or an underscore. You can't have any spaces, although that's not strictly true, there are ways around it, but it is a bit of a pain if you have spaces in named cells. Only a few symbols are allowed the underscore, period, backslash, and question mark and your name can't look like a cell reference. For example, if you wanted to reference quarter one of the year, you couldn't have a reference that said Q1.

In this spreadsheet we've got three costs all in pounds and we'd like to translate those into dollars. If I've got a hundred pounds in salaries and I want a dollar figure for that, I would say equals pick up the pound figure in B2 and then multiply by the foreign exchange rate, which we've got in cell B7. So I would either go click on cell B7 or I could type in cell B7.

Once I'd done that, I would do the same thing in row three and row four for the purchases and expenses.

However, what we have done is we've named the cell B7 F X for foreign exchange rate, which you can see in the top left hand corner.

What I can now do is when I write my formula, I say equals go pick up B2 and And multiply. I could go click on cell B7 and you would see FX appears. Alternatively, I could type in the name of the cell FX and it automatically picks that named cell up.

And additional benefit of having a named cell is that if I now want to copy this formula down, so I have 80 times the exchange rate and 60 times the exchange rate, I use control C to copy, I then select the cells. I want to copy that formula two and press control V or enter. If we look at what's happened, cell B2 becomes cell B3. When I look at purchases and B4 when I look at expenses, so that is moving down as I've copied down. However, the foreign exchange rate in cell B7 has remained fixed.

So that's an example of fixing cells and naming cells is quite useful for that.