One of the teachers at my school is having a problem with Excel that has flumoxed me and everyone else who has attempted to help.
She has put in a very simple formula (=A1+B1) which calculates fine. However when she then copies the formula down the column, the formula changes with it ok (e.g. =A2+B2, =A3+B3, =A4+B4 etc.) but it merely copies the answer from the first cell instead of running the formula.
I'm sure this is really easy to solve, which is where you lot come in....!
If she presses f9 does it then display correctly?
If so then she has switched of automatic calculation - look in tools > options > calculation tab > tick the automatic option
At the bottom right of each cell you should be able to click on the tiny black square and drag and hold and drag down wards and that should copy the formula down but it will do it for the cells to the right of it ie when you drag it down the formula, if not then you need to find the fill down option which is underneath one of the menus ( Cant remember )
what is it that she is trying to make it do exactly ?
It's a very basic thing she's trying to do - something I do hundreds of times - just copy a formula down a column in the spreadsheet. However, I've never known Excel refuse to do it properly. And it's just one instance of Excel, it's every copy she's tried around the school.Originally Posted by gecko
I have tried the black square doo-dah (sorry, that's the best word I could think of), and all options that go with it, but it still didn't work.
I haven't tried the F9 recovery yet, but will report back on Monday...unless she fixes it over the weekend.
The teacher says she owes you a virtual pint.
Does that mean I can get virtually legless?
It depends if you are virtually driving or not. After all, we wouldn't want to promoting virtual irresponsible behaviour would we?!
I'm using Excel 2000. If I have a cell with contents "=C4+D4" (w/o quotes, of course) the spreadsheet shows a value (say 7). If I select the cell and copy it, I get a cell whose content is "7" (again, no quotes). That is to say, Cntrl-C and Cntrl-V is not copying and pasting the formula, it's copying pasting the value computed by the formula. It wasn't always like this - copying formulas used to work, and I have no idea what's changed. I even tried unintalling and reinstalling Office 2000 but the problem remains.
Selecting the cell and then dragging the little box in the corner works for contigous blocks (thanks for the tip), but the general problem of copying formulae remains.
Any thoughts on this?
You could use "paste special" instead, right click on the destination cell and click "paste special" then paste formula and it should work fine. Don't know how the default changed though.
I tried Paste Special - it doesn't work either. It works the same as Ctrl-C, Cntrl-V; that is, it pastes in the value of the computation of the source cell, not the formula.
Try making the formula visible, by pressing Ctrl and that button above tab (what is that called, by the way) At least that will help in troubleshooting.
Copy it in and press ALT & Enter rather than just click into another box that might help, I had a similar problem before.
I couldn't get that to work. I selected the source cell, hit Cntrl-C move to the target cell and hit ALT-ENTER but all I got was a beep 0 nothing was pasted. Did you mean for me to do something else?
Does it have all the service packs, their up to three now, perhaps it was a bug Download details: Office 2000 Update: Service Pack 3 (SP3)
It did but after the reinstall I didn't get the latest. Thanks for pointing out that I need to update it again.
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