Thanks guys. I did finally find a help page in Excel about this "Differences
between Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3" but you needed to know it was a 123
issue. Not helped by the fact that you can't search for @ - well you can but
it doesn't find anything (even in this discussion group).

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

Lotus 123 uses @ as the function indicator: @sum(), @if().

Because excel wants to make it easy for Lotus 123 users to switch to excel, they
let you use @ when you enter the formula.



rod wrote:

If you type an @ symbol at the beginning of a cell it behaves in a similar
way to typing =. Indeed, it gets changed to = once you hit enter. Is it just
a synonym for = or does it do something else? Why is it not documented? I'm
getting errors loading data into excel programatically and I suspect its
because of a leading @ sign.

--

Dave Peterson