Excel sees that leading apostrophe as a prefixcharacter--it tells excel to treat
the cell as text (so you don't have to preformat the cell as text).

That was a bad choice to try <vbg.

Sloth wrote:

I used the "Find and Replace" feature to insert an apostrophe before the
equal sign (instead of Peter). I was just curious why I couldn't use the
find and replace feature to remove the apostrophe. It says it can't locate
it in any of the cells.

NOTE: I understand you didn't say to put an apostrophe there. I am just
being curious.

"Otto Moehrbach" wrote:

Why does the formula have a leading apostrophe? Otto
"Sloth" wrote in message
...
that's a clever trick. I was experimenting with it and replace = with '=.
This turned the cells into text but I couldn't automate the change back (I
assume this is why you inserted Peter instead). Why can Excel not find
the
leading apostrophe in the cells?

"Otto Moehrbach" wrote:

One way:
Excel recognizes that the formulas are formulas by the leading equal (=)
sign and treats them as you describe. The solution is to change that so
that Excel does not think they are formulas. Do this:
Select all the cells you want to copy.
Do Edit - Replace.
In "What to find", type "=" without the quotes.
In "Replace with" type "Peter=" without the quotes.
Copy and paste all the cells.
Select all the cells you pasted and do all that in reverse (replace
Peter=
with just =).
Done. HTH Otto
"Peter Frank" wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi,

I would like to copy some cells including their formulas as they are to
another location on the same data sheet. But whenever I try to do that,
the cell references are adapted. I tried all "Insert" variations but
none worked.

I can do this for every single cell by "opening" it, selecting its
content, and copying it. But this is very tedious when I have to do
this for many cells.

So, can you tell me whether this is an easier solution to this problem?


Peter








--

Dave Peterson