So, hello Excellers, welcome back to another #Excel blog post in my #FormulaFriday series for 2020.  Today I want to share a question that came up (again) this week.  A regular enough question.  Now, you may have already come across this problem in Excel.  If you have not, you probably will at some point when using Excel.  The mysterious case of your formula is showing in the cell not the result of the formula. It looks a bit like this below.  So, I want to share with you the top three reasons for your Excel formula showing in a cell and not the result.

Whilst it is really frustrating there are a number of reasons this can happen, and usually, I just work my way through them to resolve the problem.  Here is my troubleshooting list.

 

1. You have Show Formulas selected.

Firstly, you could have in error or accidentally hit CTRL+’ (the backquote symbol), or Formulas Tab, Formula Auditing.  To resolve this just hit CTRL+’ again to reverse this.  

 

2. You may have typed ” or have some symbol in front of the = sign.

Excel treats the cell contents as text in this scenario, so it will not evaluate the formula and just displays the cell contents.  This is an easy scenario to check.

3. Your cell is formatted as Text.

Finally, if this is the problem, then Excel will treat the formula as text instead of evaluating the formula and generating the result.  This is really easy to fix.  Just select the cell and reset the formatting to General, or you can hit F2 and Enter to change the formatting to General. One of these should resolve your issue.  Just work your way through them.  I find that this always resolved the problem.    

 

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