Dear all
I have a worksheet with several collections of information, all relevant to each other and I am doing analysis of such - this involves several steps of “find this”, “extract that”, “find something else”, “combine what is found”, and uses differing formulae - COUNT, SUMIFS, etc. However, the major specific failure in this convoluted series of operations is that I can obtain a range, but it is in text format (eg “D1:D100”) but a subsequent formula parameter requires the range to be just that - a range and not text. Is there a straightforward method to do the conversion? I don’t believe that INDIRECT is what I need but I am open to correction. BTW we are talking worksheet formulae here, not a macro. A nice function of RANGE(string) would be ideal
Yes function INDIRECT is your function. 
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Calc_Functions/INDIRECT