Formula cannot show results

[Adrian Newby]

I have an Excel workbook - very simple - just a couple of hundred rows
of text plus some formulas on each row. For most of the formulas,
behavior is as expected (i.e. you type in the formula, press Enter and
the results of the formula are displayed.) For these formulas,
pressing Ctrl-` toggles between formula and result display as it
should.

However, for other formulas, I type in the formula and no matter what
I do, I only see the formula text itself. Ctrl-` does nothing. I
have also made sure that Text and word-wrap formatting is turned off
for these cells but no result.

Is this a known bug?

 

[J.E. McGimpsey]

I have an Excel workbook - very simple - just a couple of hundred rows
of text plus some formulas on each row. For most of the formulas,
behavior is as expected (i.e. you type in the formula, press Enter and
the results of the formula are displayed.) For these formulas,
pressing Ctrl-` toggles between formula and result display as it
should.

However, for other formulas, I type in the formula and no matter what
I do, I only see the formula text itself. Ctrl-` does nothing. I
have also made sure that Text and word-wrap formatting is turned off
for these cells but no result.

Is this a known bug?

It's not a known bug.

First, I'd check again that the each cell that's showing the formula
as text is formatted as General.

Unfortunately, changing the format to a number format doesn't
convert the text into a formula. For that you can either enter edit
mode (double click the cell, or with the cell selected, type
CTRL-U), then Return.

Alternatively, you can do a Edit/Replace, replacing "=" with "="
(i.e., equals sign for equals sign, no quotes for either).