Formulas displaying as text

acollins

Board Regular
Joined
Aug 1, 2007
Messages
63
Sometimes when I enter a formula in Excel, it displays the text of the formula instead of the results. Once this happens I can't get it to display correctly. Is this a bug in Excel 2003, or have I inadvertently changed some obscure setting somewhere to display the actual formula instead of the result? If so, how do I change it back?

Simplified example:

Contents of cell A7: 000114 (Account number formatted as text)
Formula in cell b7: =A7

Contents of cell B7 displays "=A7" instead of "000114"
 

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I have already checked that. It was set to Text and I thought maybe that was the problem, however, I changed it to General, then a number of other settings, but Excel still thinks it is text, not a formula. The really weird thing is that if I click on the AutoSum button on the toolbar and go to More Functions, it displays and evaluates the function correctly (I have tried this with a number of different formulas from extremely simple like the first example I gave to complex with if and vlookup statements).

However, none of the Formula Auditing tools work. It tells me the formula doesn't contain any valid references (even though I know all of them are).

This has been happening to me with increasing frequency and it is getting very frustrating.
 
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I just took a working formula from another sheet that was similar to the one I was trying to create, copied it in to the sheet I was having problems with, adjusted the cell references, and it worked. Once I made the adjustments, it was EXACTLY like the formula I had typed in that Excel refused to recognize as a formula and displayed as text.

At least for now I can move ahead with my project since I found this work-around, but I would really like to get to the bottom of this problem as it comes up frequently.

Thanks for your help, Steve. If you have any other thoughts on what might cause this to happen, I'd love to hear them.

Alan
 
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