Thanks for your reply. I am aware of the absolute cell reference notation and use it frequently when I have a set of constants (e.g. longitude, latitude, year, month, day, timezone &c) that are referenced in many formulas. However the situation in my post was the other way round sort of.

As a concrete example (just in case I've mis-understood the situation), I have the right ascension, declination and phase angle of Venus as decimal angles in cells G80, H80 and M80 and I want the output strings in cells F3, G3 and H3. I still need to search and replace the A1 cell reference in my original post for each of the formulas.

As the poster a couple levels above pointed out I could do this as a user defined function in VBA, but I wanted my daft spreadsheet to work on Libre/Open office and on Google sheets with little or no modification. Hence the chain of if statements and round() functions.