Ask Owen

I did something to Excel and all of a sudden it’s displaying all my formulae instead of the actual contents of my cells. How do I make it display the correct values again?

I’ve seen this problem before when helping a friend with his 5th wheel insurance costing: all it takes is one wayward keypress and our spreadsheet is saved with all the formulae showing; and once the mode is turned on, other spreadsheets will appear in the same format.

Fortunately, the answer is simple – to toggle the display of formulae or values in cells, just use the keyboard shortcut Control (Ctrl) and `. That character is actualy the grave accent. On most standard keyboard layouts, this is the key that sits just to the left of the 1 and in between the Tab and Escape (Esc) keys.

On most British keyboards, this same key additionally carries a vertical pipe symbol and the notation for the logic operator NOT, which looks like a geometric hook.

Try it out. Once you know how to sort it out it’s pretty easy to resolve.

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