PIVOT TABLE AND (MORE GENERALLY) MICROSOFT OFFICE PROBLEM

[RCKVM]

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.

[#2]

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?