formula will not work, has changed or disappeared

[Ray]

A friend who works at a car dealership has asked me for some help with
an excel file he is trying to use.

The file has 8 sheet, of which 4 are for data input ( new cars, used,
commercial and other) and 4 are summary information sheet ( daily
report, summary, vehicle count, manager report.)

They have a file with no data in it, which they use as a template on
the first of each month, using "save as", and the month/yr name.

They have used this system for several years, but of late, several
thing are going wrong.

Some formulas just don’t work. i.e. =countif(G19,"van") will not
count van in G19, but =countif(G19,"truck") will work. { in any of
the G cell, 5 to 200 }

The other thing is that one ot two formulas will change i.e.
=countif($L$5:$L$155,"van") will
become =countif($H$5:$L$155,"van") or the formula will just
disappear.

The problems are in the "save as" file, but sometimes I find that the
template file has also changed.

Any help or ideas ?

Thanks

Freetrapper

 

[Dave Peterson]

I've never seen excel do this.

Any chance your friend has a macro "helping out"?

Start excel in safe mode and test her out.

Close excel
Windows start button|Run
excel /safe

(this keeps excel from running macros)

File|open your workbook and see what happens.

 

[Ray]

I've never seen excel do this.

Any chance your friend has a macro "helping out"?

Good idea, but I can not find any macro.

ray

 

[Dave Peterson]

Does this mean that you can't find it, but it may still exist--or you looked and
it doewsn't exist?

If it's the first, Debra Dalgleish has some pictures at:
http://www.contextures.com/xlfaqMac.html#NoMacros
that may help locate macros.

If it's the second, I don't have another guess.

 

[Ray]

Dave,
sorry for the delay in responding to your answer. I have been out of
town doing of all things, , , , "Work",, (sorry for the use of the 4
letter word).

First of all, thanks for the help and info. I looked at Debra's web
pages and it gave me more info on how things work. But it was not the
problem.

The sheets had a lot of errors in the formula cells and I learned the
it was because they did not turn on any protection for any of the
formula cells. Over time, whoever was using the sheet would input
information in, it would not show up in the summary sheet, so they
would type over the formula cell. I had to go back several month
before I learned what they were doing wrong. Every error they had
started in an =countif cell where someone was adding a space behind
the information. When you looked at the information it look correct,
but car was car{space}, 4 letters, not 3.

I had to check every formula and then I protected everything but the
info input cell. Everything works for now.

Thanks again,

Ray