Forum Discussion

RCKVM's avatar
RCKVM
Copper Contributor
Sep 08, 2019

PIVOT TABLE AND (MORE GENERALLY) MICROSOFT OFFICE PROBLEM

PIVOT TABLE (AND OFFICE) PROBLEM

Today suddenly all my Excel financial files switched to pivot tables, and when I open Word to write this memo the top is different than before:  top line is AutoSave followed by 5 symbols unfamiliar to me.  I’ve used Office for decades and never had such a change before.  With pivot tables I can no longer sum a series of numbers in a column, for example =sum(e1.e32)   If I try this I get #FIELD! which is meaningless to me.  And I can no longer put a comment on a cell with a red marker in the upper right hand corner of the cell.  I don’t see how I could have unwittingly made this change in Office, both to Excel and Word – can you help?  Have I somehow been hacked?

I’m Robert Valtz, in France. I’d be happy to give someone on-line access to my computer, a Dell Latitude 7280.

PIVOT TABLE PROBLEM

1 Reply

Sort By
  • JKPieterse's avatar
    JKPieterse
    Silver Contributor
    Sep 09, 2019

    Excel has something new which is called Data types. Currently only two types exist: Geography or Stocks data type. With the Geography and Stock data type you really pull in a lot of data into a single cell. To get individual fields from such a cell you type =E2.Population to get the number of people in a country (for instance).
    The syntax e2.e32 actually means that you want to get a field named "e32" from a data type in cell E2. Because there is no such field in cell E2 (and because cell E2 does not have a data type assigned to it), you get a #FIELD error. Fix this by using =SUM(E2:E32)

    ALso you wrote that "Today suddenly all my Excel financial files switched to pivot table". Can you perhaps show us a screen-shot of what you mean?

Resources