Trying to make it easier for users to copy-and-paste

[marciaf]

I have an array of about 5x100 text cells that I imported and reformatted. New information will be imported weekly. The users will select up to 20 individual rows and paste them onto a different sheet.
The problem is, the users won't want to Paste Special 20 times. But if I let them paste ordinary, the formula references float all over the place.

No problem, I figured I'd create a new grid with the same data, except with absolute references. I started by adding $'s to the first row, intending to fill the grid. Then I discovered that adding the $'s prevented the cell references from incrementing throughout the array. Let's see, I'd have to manually increment or plug in 3 $'s per cell, 500 cells. Yikes.

You'll probably say macros. For a novice it is kind of a complicated macro that allows a user to select a random row and paste it on one of up to 20 lines on a separate sheet. Even if I were to succeed, a lot of the users will be opening this with Excel, and I don't trust a macro like that to work in Excel.

What I want to be able to do is to change all these LEFT(Sheet2.D2;D6-D7) , MID(Sheet2.E2;E9-E8 blah blah blah) to plain old "JOHN SMITH" so that it can be selected and moved somewhere else by somebody who doesn't understand spreadsheets.

Thank you for any suggestions.

[marciaf]

I finished. Instead of individually selecting and pasting, the user will mark the ones they want. Then the users' sheets will pull the information off the database. I only needed to prepare the data that was requested, not the entire database. Made the difference of not having to manually insert a couple thousand dollar signs.