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Excel 2007 problem

BarkingGhostar

Diamond Member
I routinely have to manipulate data that consists of a number in one column and a letter in another column for a range of rows. Think of it like Column A is [1 .. 10]. And Column B is always "Day".

In column C I would merge the contents of Columns A and B using C1 = "B1"&A1 to get Day1 as a result. The cell C1 would literally retain the expression in the fx field and display the value in the cell.

In Excel 2007 (and maybe earlier) any highlighted cell's lower-right corner would have its corner in bold. You could double-click this corner and the expression applied to that cell will be copied through the data range in that column. This has worked like a champ, and for me the past 14 months on hundreds of spreadsheets.

Last Friday, this behavior stopped, and if I double-click the lower-right corner it now just copies and pastes the value throughout the data range even though the fx field shows the correct merge expression. So, if I go to the middle of the range and select C5 it shows ="Day"&A5 but the value shown in the cell is Day1. 😱

Is this Microsoft's new logic? Did I miss the memo? 😱
 
Well, this morning and with the wife now just as curious we tried and repeated the same problem on another computer with the same version of Excel. Since we reproduced the problem on multiple computers we all but gave up. Then I decided to save the spreadsheet with the anomalous and behold, Excel finally displayed the data correctly.

Apparently, Excel now needs you to save the spreadsheet before it will display the results correctly. And since this appears to be the case on our personal computers and my work laptop ... draw your own conclusions.
 
Ok, I went to Formulas, Calculation Options, and selected Automatic. Either Manual was by default, or something recently changed it to that. I wasn't aware of this as an option to have previously changed it, and the problem only started recently--whereas previously it wasn't a problem.

Thanks for that insight, though. Much appreciated.
 
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