The top reason for Excel formula showing as text : You may have accidentally pressed CTRL+` (back quote symbol, the key below escape key in your keyboard) or activated the “Show Formulas” mode in Excel. When you do it, excel shows the formulas instead of their results .
Click the Formulas tab. In the Formula Auditing group, click on Show Formulas. The keyboard shortcut to enable/disable showing formulas as text options is Control + `. In most cases, this should fix the problem and your formulas should show the result and not show up as text itself.
Here is what our research found. the next reason why formulas are shown as formulas: You may have set the cell formatting to “Text ” and then typed the formula in it. When you set the cell formatting to “Text”, Excel treats the formula as text and shows it instead of evaluating it. To fix this error, just select the cell, set its formatting to “General”.
When you set the cell formatting to “Text”, Excel treats the formula as text and shows it instead of evaluating it. To fix this error, just select the cell, set its formatting to “General”. Now edit the formula and press enter. (Alternatively you can press F2 and then Enter after setting format to General).
How to use the formulatext function in Excel?
As suggested by its name, FORMULATEXT function returns a formula as a text string from a specified reference. To apply FORMULATEXT function, you simply have to put a cell reference into it. In the above example, the formula of Cell B5 is displayed in Cell D5.
How do you show calculated value instead of formula in Excel?
Therefore, if you enter a formula that links one cell to a cell formatted as text, the cell with the formula is also formatted as text. To display the calculated value rather than the formula, you must change the format of the cell containing the formula and re-enter the formula.
Why do we need to edit the formula in Excel?
The reason for editing the formula is that formatting the cell to General will not have any impact on the cell’s existing contents. Similarly, if you already had the result of your formula and later the cell is formatted to Text, it will not change to the formula in text.