EVALUATE Function

[Frank H.]

I have looked on the internet but can't seem to find much
information on Excel's EVALUATE Function. I see it being
used but don't seem to have it in my function list with
Excel 2003. Can someone provide an explanation of the
EVALUATE function i.e. what it does, a little history,
etc. Thanks for your help.

 

[Jimbola]

Hi Frank,

Evaluate is not a function, hence u can't see it in the function list. It is
a formula auditing tool, located in Tools > Formula Auditing > Evaluate
Formula (EF) .
Basicaly if you enter a formula in a cell and use the EF it will show you
exactly how the result is calculated. Even if the result turns our to be an
error. Using it if you have a formula with many parts you can see how each
part is worked out by Excel.
It was introduced in Excel 2002(XP).

HTH

 

[Dave Peterson]

Maybe you have an addin that contains a homegrown =Evaluate() function.

They're pretty common around here.

Usually, developers write them to evaluate a string.

In A1:A3 (for instance)
a1 = 3
a2 = +
a3 = 5

=evaluate(a1&a2&a3)

could return 5--but it really depends on what the author of the function did.

If you have an addin that you load (maybe downloaded from the web), maybe it's
one of the functions in that. If you think you know that addin's name, post it
and I'm sure someone can be more specific.

=======
And there is an Evaluate that can be used in VBA--but I didn't guess you meant
that.

 

[John Mansfield]

Dave,

Actually, along the same lines of this post I was looking at Stephen
Bullen's site and he has a charting example from 1998 that uses EVALUATE
combined with defined names to chart a function. It does pretty much what
you've described below. I can't seem to find anything in the Excel 2003 Help
that describes this function either. Would you know why there doesn't seem
to be any documentation on this (or maybe I'm just missing it).

Thanks.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I'm not sure how Stephen used Evaluate.

But if it was a home grown function, then it was designed/written by a user--not
by microsoft.

There is an old xlm macro command called evaluate, too.

You can read more about them by getting both of these:
Macrofun.exe & Macro97.exe (which contains XLMacr8.hlp)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?freetext=Macrofun