Active cell is the one where your cursor points at, not one the formula resides in.

Anyway, I decided there is no way to solve this with regular worksheet functions only, so I did find an alternative solution - so the case is closed.

The task was to design a worksheet for keeping a grouped registry of item ID's, where ID's are growing from 1 to 999 for every grop on every calendary day - and I needed to know next available ID for currently entered item irrespective of table ordering.

Arvi Laanemets