Excel Tip: How do you create a dynamic reference to a cell and retrieve it’s value

I stumbled across a handy function in Excel today – Indirect(). Basically, it allows you to convert a string into a cell reference. Typically, in excel, if you want the value of a particular cell (say A5), you use the following:

=A5

However, indirect allows you to refer to the same cell, but as a string

=INDIRECT("A5")
=INDIRECT("A" & "5")

This enables you do to some pretty cool things, like let the user choose which column they want to sum:

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