Sum: Cells That Contain Numbers And Letters

Today I ran into an odd problem. I typed in values for column A rows 1 through 10 then values for column B rows 1 through 10. then in column C, I made the formula C1=A1/B1. The math was correct it showed 542 in the C1 cell. So I dragged that formula down and it showed 542 in all column C cells which is not correct. And when I went to check to see if the formula was correctly dragged it was. For instance, the formula in C2 is =A2/B2 however the value of that cell showed 542 which was not the correct math/value.

But it gets even more weird. When I click on the Column C cells and then it shows the formula up top in the formula bar and if I put my cursor anywhere in the formula bar and hit Return the formula does not change however the correct value then appears in the Column C cell. It is like the act of putting the cursor in the formula activates it to work properly but until it is activated that C cell shows the value of the cell which it was dragged down from.

This is quite bizarre. Has anyone ever seen this before? I have no idea what is going on. I ran a scan for viruses and none were found. I tried it on several new/different spreadsheets but it keeps happening.

Thanks for any tips on this.

Posted this on the Ozgrid forums, but haven't gotten any help yet, so I thought I'd try here too!

I've been having a strange problem lately. I have a fairly lengthy macro that works perfectly most of the time. Occasionally it will run as expected but as soon as the macro ends, excel becomes unresponsive to mouse-clicks. When I click anywhere (trying to select a cell, or an excel menu item...clicking anywhere in excel) I'll get the a 'ding' system sound and nothing will happen. BUT, if I use the keyboard arrow keys, I can see that the active cell selection moves accordingly. Then it gets really strange - when I have a cell highlighted and press any key to input text, it gets duplicated. So if I press "s' it will input "ss" into the cell, and then when I press enter it will auto-move to the next cell down, but nothing ends up getting saved into the previous cell.

I don't understand what's going on at all. I can't think of anything in my macro that would have these kinds of effects. I've made sure that screenupdating is turned back on at the end of every procedure. If I go into the VBE, I can manually run procedures and they all work fine. The only way I've been able to get back to normal is by force closing excel altogether and re-opening. Any ideas?

______________________

Still having trouble, and the same thing is happening with this workbook on two different computers, so I don't think it's a hardware, or OS specific issue. When it gets locked up like this, I can still do anything in the VBE (edits cells, run macros, etc.) with no problems. If I'm in the excel window, I can click alt on the keyboard and the shortcut keys for the menu come up, but I can't go deeper than that by clicking the letter shortcuts, they do nothing. If I use the delete key to delete the contents of a cell, then it gets deleted. But if I type anything else (numbers, letters, or symbols) then it types 2 instances of the key every time, yet when I hit enter, nothing changes in the cell. I also can't really bring focus to the excel window if something else (ie. the VBE) is on top of it, clicking into the excel window just gives the little system 'ding' sound and nothing happens.

If I hit the save button in the VBE (since I can't click anything in the excel window), then it seems to snap out of it and go back to normal. I tried searching for anything simmilar to this and can't find anything...

Any help would be much appreciated. This is driving me nuts!

Hi All,

I am trying to make excel automatically add a leading zero to values which are 5 digits long;

i.e. number input is 15185, then excel automatically changes it to 015185.

If I put a Customer Number Format of 0##### it works, however, a user could put any length of number into these cells, and if the number is less than 5 digits I don't want a leading zero.

Is there any way of writing a small macro to sort this out.

The numbers would be input into range B16:223.

Many thanks,


Andy

i've been trying to figure this out on my own but seem to be hitting road blocks.

i have a column of numbers that we extracted from a database as whole numbers. for instance, 30 should be .30 and 100 should be 1.00. when i try to increase or decrease the decimal point it doesn't allow me to convert it to those positions.

would any one have a tip of how i can easily convert this? there are over 2000 entries in my excel spreadsheet so to do it manually would take a lot of time/effort.

thank you!

I saw two threads in this forum that asked this question, with no good answer. I am posting this solution for anybody still struggling with this.

The question:
How can you prevent a cell's contents from overflowing into the next cell?

Of course, you can make the column wider or turn on text wrapping, but you might not want to. Each of those solutions can mess up the layout of your sheet. You may just want to truncate the value.

Some people have suggested putting a space in the next cell. This is unnecessary, a pain in the but, and will mess up any ISBLANK type formulas, among other things.

The solution:
Select the cells in question and turn on text wrapping (Format>Cells>Alignment>Wrap Text).
Now select the row(s) in question and manually set the row height, by right clicking the row number and selecting "Row Height". Check the height of an adjacent row for a good value.

Your cells will now not spill over either horizontally or vertically. They will simply truncate anything that doesn't fit.

Be careful now, because parts of your data may be hidden. This can cause its own set of problems if one or two digits are neatly hidden away. Think ahead if other people might be using this sheet, and not be expecting to have some data hidden.

Tested in Excel 2002

Hi there

Please can someone help me. How do I create an IF formula to find cells where the number of hours in one cell is more than the number of hours in another cell? eg one cell has 0.40 hrs and another has 02.25 hours - I want have an IF formula to say where 02.25hrs > 0.40 then type "FAILED" but I cant overcome the greater than problem on the hours which is giving me the wrong answer.

I would like to copy a small table from Word into one cell in an Excel
worksheet. The first column of the table is a list of numbers. I tried
converting the table into text with manual line breaks and tab stops to
divide columns and rows, but that didn't solve my problem.

Excel pastes the data into several rows. When I try to merge them, I
get a warning that the selection contains multiple data values, and
merging into one cell keeps the upper-left most data only.

What I tried that didn't work:
* Formatting the Excel cells as text before pasting the data.
* The various options for "Paste Special." The closest I got was
inserting the table as a Document Object, which could be a workaround,
I guess.
What I am saving for when all else fails:
* The obvious solution of copying row by row into one Excel cell.

The data in the table is information about my dad's medications. I
would like to have reference charts of how to identify the strength of
each tablet by its color and markings. I got the info from the
manufacturers' websites and entered it into tables in Word, which I
would like to copy into a more comprehensive file I am creating in
Excel. The first column of each table is the strength of the tablet,
entered as 1 mg., 2 mg., etc. The subsequent columns describe the
shape, color, and markings. There are 3 tables, each with about 4-5
rows.

Is there a way to copy each one - whether as a table or as text - into
a single Excel cell without losing data?

Many thanks.

Hello, I'm trying to count the number of times a name appears across multiple worksheets but I can't seem to figure it out.


I have 6 sheets to count and all the names are in column A (from A1:A100) on each sheet. The names are not in a particular order.

On sheet 7 I want to have a cell beside each persons name that counts the number of times their name appeared on the other 6 sheets.

For example Sheet 7 (called total) would have

Joe 5 (where 5 is the outcome of the formula I'm looking for to count all the times "Joe" appears on sheets 1-6).

I have it counting per sheet with =COUNTIF(A1:A130,"name") but this is not quite what I am looking for.

Thanks in advance for any advice.


Edit: I am using Excel 2007 w/ windows XP

for example if you have values of

1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1
how to count number of occurances where value of 1 is 3 consecutive times? Obviously answer is 3 in this instance but is there an excel formula to count/sum this?

Thanks in advance

Hello all,

Until now I have been able to find all my answers through searches. As a VBA novice, it has been very helpful. I am stumped on this one, however. I am trying to autofill from the selected cell in Column C down. I would like it to stop at the last cell with data in Column B. This is the code I have so far:

Range("C2").Select
Selection.AutoFill Destination:=Range(Selection, Selection.End(xlDown))

This does the autofill, but doesn't stop at the last cell with data in Column B.

In the past I have use this code to acheive similar results:

Dim endRow As Long
endRow = Cells(Rows.Count, "B").End(xlUp).Row
Range("C2").AutoFill Destination:=Range("C2:C" & endRow)

The problem with this code is that I will not always be starting in "C2". I need code that uses whatever the selected cell is.

All help is appreciated. Thanks!

Sorry for the question. Normally I find answers to my excel questions by going through the help tab or by searching on Google. However, I don't even know what question to ask on this one!?!

Basically I have created a spreadsheet with several columns, but I have one column that lists the shirt size (YS, YM, YL, AS, AM, AL, XL, 2X, 3X) of each person. Is there a formula that I can create that will tabulate the number of sizes (i.e. AS=2, AM=7, etc.)?

In previous years I made a column for each size, and simply placed a "1" in the correct column, and had excel just add the 1's from each column. However, that takes more time and space. I was hoping to streamline it this time around.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks, doug

Ran into a problem I've never seen before. When dragging a cell across that contains a sum equation the result was the following cells with the same value. Inside the cell it showed what would be the correct new equation, but the value was still from the original cell. Any ideas on what's causing this?

If I double click the cell and then hit enter it will re-total the area and then give me the correct value, but I'd obviously rather is just work right the first time.

I have a problem: I can't show some rows after they've been hidden with a macro. I tryed the "select all / unhide", but it doesn't work.

I noticed the row numbers are all blue now. What does it mean? (This could be the answer..:P)

Hello

I'm quite experienced Excel user. I've never come across this problem but tinkering in every conceivable way within Excel settings and the solution has eluded me.

I have added a worksheet created elsewhere (it is a form I need printing, with the data coming from 2 sheets I have created from scratch) which has pre formatted cells for Date and Client Name etc.

When I try to reference the cell in this added sheet from my 2 sheets, instead of the result, it always displays the formula, not the result.

I have tried doing it from one of my sheets to reference to this new, and that displays the result and not formula. I can't imagine why it's doing this and I've never seen it happen before.

Formatting cells, giving cells names rather than the usually adequate of reference to the Cell Number doesn't change things. I wonder if I've picked up some legacy protection from the original form but can't see anywhere in the tools etc that's obvious.

There's about 50+ cells that need referencing and I got to get this done for work.

Please help me. This is my first need to post on a Excel Forum as I've always found help or answers from other peeps or internet but this one is making me scratch my head big time.

Hi there,

I'm very new to Excel, and I'm having trouble figuring a few things out. Hopefully this will be very easy for you guys!

In Sheet 1, I have a column of cells that I would like to also appear in Sheet 2. If I add a new row to the column in Sheet 1, I would also like it to be updated automatically in Sheet 2. Currently, I can get it to show the contents of individual cells from Sheet 1 in Sheet 2 by using this formula in the formula bar for each cell in Sheet 2:

=Sheet1!A3 (or whichever cell it is)

That's fine, but I'd like to just have a formula that will reproduce the entire column (ie. without a fixed range, as new rows are going to be added to the column).

If anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd be very very grateful. Thanks.