Column Numbers in Excel?

Thursday, 12 May, 2016

I’ve been doing some more programming in R recently and working on a large XLSX spreadsheet (using the excellent readxl package) where I needed to cross-reference columns. Excel painfully uses letters for column titles and I needed the column number; useful to know then that you can change this option in Excel:

Pre-ribbon
Go to Tools, Options, General, check ‘R1C1 reference style’

Ribbon
Go Options, Formulas, check ‘R1C1 reference style’