I have an (older) program for collecting quotes from various stocks. This programm does support DDE.

In Excel (2000 and later) I have the names of the stocks in column A.
Bij entering Progname|LAST!symbol into a cell in column B , I can retrieve the value of that particular stock (symbol) in Excel.

But I don't want to enter the symbol for each stock in column B but would just like to reference the cell in column A, something like
Progname|LAST!A5 but that doesn't work.

How can I make it work?