There's a quiet elegance in what DryKaleidoscope2404 is trying to do here, even if their description reads more like a puzzle than a solution. They've used INDEX and MATCH to return a cell reference in Q3, and now they want to take the value from I3 on one sheet and drop it into whatever cell that reference points to on another sheet. The instinct is right. The execution, however, is stuck in the gap between what spreadsheets can do and what we wish they could do by default.
This is a familiar frustration. You've built the logic, you've connected the dots, and then you hit the wall where a formula returns a reference, not a value. The good news is that the solution exists, and it's not buried in some obscure menu. It's a matter of shifting from thinking in terms of copying and pasting to thinking in terms of direct referencing. Instead of trying to automate the paste, you can simply have the target cell on the second sheet pull from I3 directly. If Q3 is already returning the correct address, you can wrap that in INDIRECT, or better yet, restructure the whole approach so the value flows without the intermediate step. The automation isn't in the copy-paste action; it's in the formula itself.
What makes this worth pausing on is not the specific formula trick, but what it represents. The user is bumping against the limits of a mental model where spreadsheets are static grids you move things around in. But the real power of a modern spreadsheet is that it can be a live system, where values update, references resolve, and workflows run themselves. The moment you stop asking "how do I copy this cell" and start asking "how do I make this cell always reflect the right data," you've crossed into a different way of working. That shift is accessible to anyone willing to spend ten minutes with a function like INDEX, MATCH, or INDIRECT, and it pays off every single time you avoid a manual update.
So here's the practical takeaway: if you're trying to do what DryKaleidoscope2404 described, stop trying to automate the paste. Instead, make the destination cell reference the source directly. If the cell location needs to be dynamic, use INDIRECT to translate the address returned by INDEX and MATCH into a live reference. That's the whole trick. It's simple, it's repeatable, and it turns a one-off manual task into a formula that works every time. The spreadsheet doesn't need to copy anything. It just needs to know where to look.