text: what is a $ stands for in a cell reference in excel?   when you copy cells with formulas in them, excel changes the the formula to make a guess as to what your new formula references should be.  however there are cases in which you do not what excel to change a cell reference.  by putting the $ in front of the column or row reference excel will not change it when copying.  for example: a1 contains 10.  b1 through b10 contains a series of the values 1 to 10. in c1 you create the formula =a1*b1.  now you want to copy this formula down 9 more times to multiply 10 times each number but when you do the copy, excel automatically changes the formulas and such: a2*b2, a3*b3, etc.  so to keep a1 in the formula all the way down.  make your formula =a$1*b1 (f4 key toggles this).  then when you copy the cells the reference to a1 doesn't change for all formulas