I may be the last person remaining on earth who still uses the original
Lotus 1-2-3 Rel 1A, which I know and love, on an antique DOS machine.

I've never had a reason to upgrade to a later version of 1-2-3, and
have no idea how it now behaves, but one important feature of Release
1A is that instead of rigidly assuming that Copy or Move will always
refer to the contents of the active cell, /c (or /m) followed by
Backspace frees the cell pointer without changing the active cell.
This means that you can easily perform a "reverse" Copy or Move, by
going to the cell you want copied, and hitting Enter, twice, to place
the contents of the highlighted cell in what has remained the active
cell, without affecting your original screen display. Or, you can also
"reverse" Copy or Move a multicell range.

I've only recently had to begin using Excel 2000 on a Windows machine,
and can't figure out how to do this same procedure. I almost never
predesignate a named range for the source information, as it's always
different, so unless I happen to know the source cell coordinates I do
need to move the cell pointer once in any case; but I find it a real
nuisance to then be required to find my way back to the target cell to
complete the procedure. This is especially true because the target
cell is almost never in the upper left corner of the original display,
and I need to return to the exact same display since nearly all of my
spreadsheets are organized visually into "pages" consisting of
specified rows and columns which I access not with names but simply
with PgUp, PgDn, Tab, and BackTab. What could be easier than executing
"copy [whatever] HERE", instead of having to go not only to the source
cell, but then being forced to find your way back?

Does anyone know of a way to make Excel do this?

kaream,

You could use two simple macros, which you could assign to commandbar
buttons or do hot-key combinations. The code is below.

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP

Sub Copy123()
Dim SourceCell As Range
Dim TargetCell As Range

Set TargetCell = Selection
Set SourceCell = Application.InputBox( _
"Choose the range that you want to copy", Type:=8)
SourceCell.Copy TargetCell
End Sub

Sub Move123()
Dim SourceCell As Range
Dim TargetCell As Range

Set TargetCell = Selection
Set SourceCell = Application.InputBox( _
"Choose the range that you want to move", Type:=8)
SourceCell.Cut TargetCell
End Sub


"kaream" wrote in message
ups.com...
I may be the last person remaining on earth who still uses the original
Lotus 1-2-3 Rel 1A, which I know and love, on an antique DOS machine.

I've never had a reason to upgrade to a later version of 1-2-3, and
have no idea how it now behaves, but one important feature of Release
1A is that instead of rigidly assuming that Copy or Move will always
refer to the contents of the active cell, /c (or /m) followed by
Backspace frees the cell pointer without changing the active cell.
This means that you can easily perform a "reverse" Copy or Move, by
going to the cell you want copied, and hitting Enter, twice, to place
the contents of the highlighted cell in what has remained the active
cell, without affecting your original screen display. Or, you can also
"reverse" Copy or Move a multicell range.

I've only recently had to begin using Excel 2000 on a Windows machine,
and can't figure out how to do this same procedure. I almost never
predesignate a named range for the source information, as it's always
different, so unless I happen to know the source cell coordinates I do
need to move the cell pointer once in any case; but I find it a real
nuisance to then be required to find my way back to the target cell to
complete the procedure. This is especially true because the target
cell is almost never in the upper left corner of the original display,
and I need to return to the exact same display since nearly all of my
spreadsheets are organized visually into "pages" consisting of
specified rows and columns which I access not with names but simply
with PgUp, PgDn, Tab, and BackTab. What could be easier than executing
"copy [whatever] HERE", instead of having to go not only to the source
cell, but then being forced to find your way back?

Does anyone know of a way to make Excel do this?

Great -- Thanks very much, Bernie. I was sure there must be some
workaround for this.