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tmlmyusername's avatar
tmlmyusername
Copper Contributor
May 07, 2021

HELP! stuck excel cell formula I cant get rid of

Hi - I'm no excel guru - was doing a cut/paste of a few hundred rows of data, and somehow hit a wrong key(s), and now can't get rid of this weird formula I inadvertently created, which has my spreadsheet locked up. Hitting delete or backspace does nothing.

 

The formula at the top of my excel spreadsheet displays this:  

=421:G6562.45 

421 is the very top row in the section I was highlighting,

and G656 was the very first cell I started to highlight.

52.45 is the value in that cell

 

Any help someone can provide so that I can get back to my project is SINCERELY appreciated.

THANK YOU in advance!

 

Tom

  • ChrisInUtah2024's avatar
    ChrisInUtah2024
    Copper Contributor

    tmlmyusername 

    I clicked on formulas and over towards the right there is a "Show formulas" option.  Click that and it goes back to normal. For me anyway it did.

    • ricekrispiesde's avatar
      ricekrispiesde
      Copper Contributor

      tmlmyusername this happened to me as well! I went under the Formulas tab, clicked on "Recently Used" and chose Sum. It then let me put in numbers to add. Once I hit OK, it changed the stuck formula to a sum formula and I was then able to delete it and unfreeze my spreadsheet. Hope this works for you, too!

  • Andrew990's avatar
    Andrew990
    Copper Contributor
    The same exact thing happened to me. Did anyone figure out how to fix this?
    • tmlmyusername's avatar
      tmlmyusername
      Copper Contributor

      Hi Hans Vogelaar, thank you for reaching out. There is no sensitive data in the spreadsheet, so I hope these screenshots will suffice. First image is from the spreadsheet I was working on when things locked up. Second image shows the different circular reference in the formula bar of the 2nd spreadsheet

       

       

       

       

      • tmlmyusername's avatar
        tmlmyusername
        Copper Contributor
        Apologize if the image quality is fuzzy. To your request of sending a copy of the file - I am unable to do anything with either file. Almost all functions are disabled, including copy/paste. I can't even open another new excel spreadsheet. When I try to do any of these things I get "There is a problem with this formula" error message. I've tried putting an apostrophe in front of the formula as suggested to try & fix the formula, but that's as far as I can get. And I wasn't trying to create a formula at all. Just ended up with me mistakenly hitting 1 or more keys on the keyboard when I was trying to cut/paste

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