Have a look at the INDIRECT function. It takes a text value and converts it
into a reference.

Rob


"dhstein" wrote in message
...
I needed to create a text string which is a formula. I did it and now have
400 entries like the following:
=DATE(2003,10,04)
Each of these entries is a unique date which was converted from the
original
Lotus file. But each entry is a text string - not a formula. So the
actual
value in the cell is just as shown above - it displays as
=DATE(YYYY,MM,DD).
There is an apostrophe at the beginning. I can manually edit each entry
and
delete the apostrophe, but that's a pain in the you know what. I can't do
a
replace all - replacing apostrophe with nothing - that doesn't work. I
need
these entries to be formulas so that they display as the actual Date - and
in
addition I want to keep the formula - in other words I don't want to do a
paste special values. Any suggestions?