Folks,

Here's the solution to a nasty user-induced 'bug' that ranks up there with
my having spent three hours bird dogging why my commands were not working on
an old IBM 370 mainframe in 1975 -- I had 'set uplow' during the session, and
my commands were lower case as I keyed them, no longer in upper case as I had
been accustomed to having the system do automatically for me.

A user had a spreadsheet whose

1) numbers were left justified, not right justified as is normal
2) formulas beginning with an '=' sign were treated as strings and not
evaluated.

In this case, check:

1. the format of the cells. the user's were 'Text', not 'General'. So of
course they'll be treated as text.

2. Tools Options, Error Checking tab. There is a setting to treat numbers
as text. Clear that.

3. Compounding this was an incorrect reference to a merged cell. If cells on
sheet A1 are merged, use =A1!C3, not =A1!C3:F3.




--
Bob Sullentrup