How to increment variable instead of result

[chandles]

We all know that if we put the number 1 into cell A1 and then put =A1+1 into cell A2 that it will calculate and display the number 2, and so on.

I have a different situation now and want to increment the variable instead of the calculated result. For example, if cell A2 has =A1+1 then I want cell A3 to have =B1+1, A4 to have =C1+1 and so on. I feel like there must be a way but couldn’t track anything down, maybe not describing it right.

In my particular situation, the first cell has a formula like:
=J4 & "--" & L2 and the next cell should be
=J4 & "--" & M2, increasing the letter of the second variable.
After 12 cells… the formula will be
=J5 & "--" & L2 and then
=J5 & "--" & M2 and so on.

Just figuring out how to quickly copy/paste the set of 11 or 12 cells would be immensely helpful, and then I can manually input the 13th cell and quickly paste 11 more cells, and so on.
Thanks!

[karolus]

Hallo

=TEXTJOIN("--";1;A1:Z1)

or start somewhere with:

=TEXTJOIN("--";1;A$1:INDEX($1:$1;ROW(A2)))

and pull down

[chandles]

Wow thank you!  Never would have come up with that in a million years.
I have a bit more experience with bash script and just came up with this too:
for i in {L..W}; do echo '=J4 & "--" & '"${i}"'2'; done
then just copy/paste

[karolus]

Looks like youre really after itertools — Functions creating iterators for efficient looping — Python 3.11.2 documentation