The primary cause is that calculation is turned off
Tools, Options, Calculation (tab), make calculation automatic.

There are other possibilities, such as the format was changed
from text to something else, but is not effective until reentered.

If you want to reenter a lot of formulas, select all cells on the sheet
Ctrl+A (or if Excel 2003 Ctrl+Shift+SpaceBar) then
Bring up the Replace dialog Ctrl+H
change from: = (equal sign)
change to: = (equal sign)
which will work even with Calculation off, but I would suggest that
you turn calculation on, just in case the order makes a difference.

The first workbook opened determines whether calcualtion is turned
on or off. Usually this will be your personal.xls workbook.
---
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm

"KiwiSteve" wrote in message ups.com...
Many of my users have ocassional instances where a formula is copied
from adjacent cells and will not work until the cursor is placed in the
edit bar and the formula edit is confirmed (with no changes). Once the
'no change' edit is done, the cell value will change from VALUE to the
correct result. I have seen similiar reports of this in many groups,
but no one seems to be able to say why this is happening, they only
talk about work arounds after the problem has happened, but I would
really like to know if there is a way of preventing it. We use Excel
2003.