Thanks T.V. That one was the easy solution given in many places in the
forums. But it simply is no use if you need a RESULT based on whether or not
a cell contains a formula or not.

I don't know about the original poster, but one of my needs (for which I use
a user defined function) is to enter in one cell a formula which will will
have one resultant value if ANOTHER cell (often on another sheet) contains a
formula and a different value if it doesn't. One case, for instance, has 2
sheets which contain information about different financial accounts. When
planning is in process, if money is planned to move from one account to
another, one of the sheets has a formula put in to calculate how much money
to move. The other sheet originally simply referred to that cell so it had
the same value. However, until that transfer was actually made (or ordered),
the second (receiving account) sheet was showing a credit which was only
tentative and all further balances were incorrect. Once the transfer was
made/ordered, the first sheet's cell would be converted to a value as it was
now a fixed amount.

Now, we have inserted the user function in the second cell which provides
the correct value if the first cell does NOT have a formula in it, otherwise
it contains 0 (zero) as no real transfer has been made. It means that when
the conversion is done on the first cell, we don't have to remember to go and
change the second cell.

Formatting cannot do this. The user function is fine, but as this is only
one of a number of shared spreadsheets, the function has to be included with
them all. If there was a Microsoft spreadsheet function, it would be
available to all users of all spreadsheets.

"T. Valko" wrote:

reasonably simple SPREADSHEET FUNCTION

That depends on how you define "reasonably simple"!

To me, this is reasonably simple:

http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/usertips/tip045.htm

Although it describes how to use conditional formatting it can be used as a
worksheet function as well.

Biff

"brit0n" wrote in message
...
"JMay" wrote:

In VBA there is a property: HasFormula of the Range Object

Thanks for that JMay. You referred to the same method as earlier responses
including a complete user function. But no-one has definitively answered
the
precise question which was why I re-activated the thread.

The question is whether or not there is a reasonably simple SPREADSHEET
FUNCTION or combination of spreadsheets functions which can be used rather
than a user defined function (using the HasFormula property).

I guess we have to assume that for no known reason Microsoft decided not
to
include a built-in Spreadsheet function for "IsFormula()".