Thanks for the quick reply, and let me elaborate on the actual problem.

A few days ago I posted a question under the title of "SUMIF...", and xld was kind enough to supply the exact UDF that I needed to solve my problem.

The *unintended* consequence of using that UDF 100+ times on my worksheet was horrible performance due to Excel event processing kicking in that executed the those 100+ UDF 100's if not 1000+ times depending on what the user attempted to do on the worksheet. For example, my batch analytics macro that populates that particular sheet based on 10,000 + rows of raw data input data on a separate worksheet in this workbook used to take 40 seconds... w 100+ UDF's in place, it took 98 minutes... clicking on an Outline "+/-" icon resulted in a 5+ minute wait. Clearly unacceptable.

So while I need the functionality of that original UDF that dynamically summarizes cells based on "Like" parameter matching (e.g., "*gbw*M*"), I cannot live w the horrible performance that it renders on my particular application. Additionally, I should also tell you that there are 2000+ non-adjacent cell names on this particular sheet that this UDF dynamically summarizes based on said parameter matching, so the resulting calculation is not trivial.

Therefore, I need to situationally locate all of those cells (it could be anywhere between 8 - 120 cells for a given sub-category summary) and construct a native Excel formula and replace the UDF all in a single step.

Hopefully this explanation clears up why I'm trying to do this in a single step as my concept code originally intended. Can this be done, or does this violate Excel in some way?

Thank you.