Hi all,
Thank you for the responses - Missed all of this because Outlook stuck the
reply email into my Junk Email folder ... And accessing this forum is for
some reason extremely cumbersome - IE crashing, logging in, can't find my
topic, then can find it, it's not a good experience.

Meanwhile with regard to the formula - I appreciate everyone giving me the
correct formula; however, I don't understand why the original formula
wouldn't work, as it follows all the 'rules' of the SUM function.... This
seems like an Excel shortcoming to me. And I am imagining that this worked in
previous versions, but could definitely be mistaken there.

Anyway, thanks for all the help.
Cheers,
Marianne









"T. Valko" wrote:

How do you get the original formula to work
doesn't it give you a value error?

Depends on where the formula is entered.

The formula is in D5

So, what's happening is A4 minus D4 (200-10) = 190

Try putting the formula in E5 then you'll get #VALUE!

The reason it returns a number when entered in cell D5 is because the
formula is entered in a column that directly intersects a cell in the
referenced range, D4.

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Brad" wrote in message
...
How do you get the original formula to work - doesn't it give you a value
error?


"T. Valko" wrote:

Try it like this:

=A4-SUM(B4:D4)

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"MarianneS40" wrote in message
...
This is probably something so simple, but I can't figure it out, can
someone
help?

I'm trying to deduct a range of values from the first value in the row:

A4 B4 C4 D4
200 50 60 10

The formula is in D5 and looks like this: =SUM(A4-B4:D4)

The answer SHOULD be 80, but the formula says 190.

I've also tried =SUM(A4-(B4:D4)), same issue.

I know there are ways I can work around this, but am curious why this
doesn't seem to be working?