Sounds like XL interpreted the formula as tabular for some reason.

Select B2, click in the Edit Formula box on the Formula Bar and paste.
Remove any spurious line feeds.


In article ,
"ynot" wrote:


thank you for your prompt response as I should have noted I'm a true rookie
to excel, as I only had the 2.5 minute training and probaly should have
bosted to the dummies for excel..... all values in column "A" = X' Y"; if I
try to paste formule to B2.... which it won't allow I see MID(text,
start_num,NUM_CHARS) which the paste place
=LEFT(A2,FIND("'",A2)-1)+MID(LEFT(A2,LEN(A2)-1), in A2 and
FIND("'",A2)+1,255)/12 in A3..... did I choke something?