Bug with merging the cells

[irresistible007]

Dear everyone,

I have found today a very annoying bug today while working on Excel 2003, below is the thing, please advise your opinion as how should i troubleshoot the issue:

I have a Sheet detailing each and every order of various products like in this way:

A= Customer name, B= product name, c= quantity.... (other are irrelevant to mention)

Sometimes our customer request partial shipment so lets say the product is Gamma, i enter info in excel in following way:

A1(merged with cell A2)= ABC company, B1 & B2 (not merged)= Gamma, C1=5, C2=10

At the end of this huge list i have made a simple summary for quick ref. in cell E141 I put an array formula to know how much a specific customer has bought a specific product:

E141 {=SUM(IF((LEFT(A1:A117, 3)="ABC")*(LEFT(B1:B117, 5)="Gamma"), C4:C117, 0))}

The above formula gave me after summing C1 (didnt included C2)

I have checked for the reason and found that when i click cell A1 merged with A2... It shows under name Box A1 so in this way A2 lost its identity !! hence when the above formula calculates it didnt checked for cell C2...

I can troubleshoot by simply entering the customer name separatly into A1 & A2 but I wouldn't prefer this cuz merged cells indicates same order to me and you would probably agree that its nonsense to mention the customer's name 2 times instead of mentioning 1 time for his single order with two separate shipments...

I think i have pointed towards a serious issue.

 

[Peter_SSs]

irresistible007

Not sure that I have completely understood this, but instead of merging the 2 cells, would the 'Centre Across Selection' format be any good? This should retain the identity of the 2 underlying cells.

 

[Barry Katcher]

Aha! Another "merged cells" frizzle-bobble.

Maybe this would help - instead of merging A1 & A2 (and the rest of the pairs in column A), try using =A1 in cell A2, and changing the color of the font to white (or whatever the background color is). It would then appear as below, but with cells A2 & A4 appearing to be blank (Colo's utility doesn't support font color changes).

Book1
	A	B	C	D
1	ABC Company	Gamma	12
2	ABC Company	Gamma	15
3	FUBAR Company	Delta	4
4	FUBAR Company	Upsunose	8
Sheet1