Rules for what a name can and cannot contain

Dan Holme

October 30, 2007

1 Min Read
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  • The name cannot include spaces but underscore characters and periods may be used as word separators -- for example, Sales_Tax or First.Quarter.

  • It cannot look too much like a cell address... For example, you cannot name a range of quarterly sales "Q1" because Q1 is a cell address.

  • The first character of a name must be a letter or an underscore character. The first character of a name cannot be a number. Remaining characters in the name can be letters, numbers, periods, and underscore characters.

  • A name can contain up to 255 characters.

  • Names can contain uppercase and lowercase letters. Names are not case sensitive.

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