The AREAS Function

You can use the AREAS function to determine the number of areas in a reference. Areas refer to individual cell or range references, not regions. The single argument to this function can be a cell reference, a range reference, or several range references. If you use several range ref-erences, you must enclose them in a set of parentheses so that Microsoft Office 2010 Excel doesn’t misinterpret the commas that separate the ranges. (Although this function takes only one argument, Excel still interprets unenclosed commas as argument separators.) For example, suppose you assign the name Test to the group of ranges A1:C5,D6,E7:G10. The function =AREAS(Test) returns the number 3, the number of areas in the group.

The TRANSPOSE Function

The TRANSPOSE function changes the horizontal or vertical orientation of an array. It takes a single argument, array. If the argument refers to a vertically oriented range, the resulting array is horizontal. If the range is horizontal, the resulting array is vertical. The first row of a horizontal array becomes the first column of the vertical array result, and vice versa. You must type the TRANSPOSE function as an array formula in a range that has the same num-ber of rows and columns as the array argument has columns and rows, respectively.