Sum not working in Excel365

[nora1212]

Hi,

I have excel 365 on my chromebook and for some reason it will not calculate the addition of two summed cells and returns the answer of zero? E.g Cell A3 is =Sum(a1:a2), Cell B3 is =Sum(b1:b2). When i enter in Cell C3, "=A3+B3", the answer is given as 0? The cells are not in text format, they are all in general format. It works as you'd expect on my other laptop using normal windows based excel, but will not work on the chromebook. Can't work out why it will not calculate? Any ideas? There seems to be limited options on excel 365 on a chromeboook compared to the full version, but obviously this basic sum should work.

 

[awoohaw]

Its really hard to debug this kind of issue unless you post a mini workbook using the xl2bb add in. (Link below).

Based on how you wrote the quesition, i would enter =A3+B3 without the double quotation marks.

Have you tried =SUM(A3:B3)?

 

[Joe4]

When i enter in Cell C3, "=A3+B3", the answer is given as 0? The cells are not in text format, they are all in general format.

Just because the cells are formatted as "General" does NOT mean that the data has NOT been entered as Text.

Try entering these formulas in any blank cells:

=ISNUMBER(A3)
=ISNUMBER(B3)

If either of these return FALSE, then those cells are indeed Text entries, and not numeric.
Simply changing the format of the cells of existing data does NOT change their format. They need to be re-entered.
You can re-enter a whole column at one by selecting the column, going to "Text to Columns" from the Data menu, and clicking Finish.
You might have to do this twice, once for column A and once for column B.

 

[nora1212]

Thanks for the help. I've now sorted it. Seems there was a circular reference which was causing the problem - although excel didn't notify me of this on the chromebook, but it did on my phone? Thanks again.