Found the answer - a bug in Excel which stops the status bar displaying the
count if the sheet contains 51 or more calculated cells. The 'fix' is to turn
off automatic recalculation (Tools Options - Calculation tab & select
manual calculation)

"JayDax" wrote:

I have two Excel spreadsheets. In one the results of applying a filter are
displayed in the status bar - eg. '24 of 144 records found'. In the other I
get just 'Filter mode'.
I've examined the option settings - they appear identical. There are no
macros attached to the sheets either. The '24 of 144 records found' type of
message is very useful. How do I make all my spreadsheets produce it on
filtering?