Defined Names

The specification has the following to say about defined names:

“Defined names are descriptive text that is used to represents a cell, range of cells, formula, or constant value.”

This means they are very loosely defined. They might contain a constant, a formula, a single cell reference, a range of cells or multiple ranges of cells across different worksheets. Or all of the above. They are defined globally for a workbook and accessed from there defined_names attribue.

Sample use for ranges

Accessing a range called “my_range”:

my_range = wb.defined_names['my_range']
# if this contains a range of cells then the destinations attribute is not None
dests = my_range.destinations # returns a generator of (worksheet title, cell range) tuples

cells = []
for title, coord in dests:
    ws = wb[title]