The top reason for Excel formula showing as text : You may have accidentally pressed CTRL+` (back quote symbol, the key below escape key in your keyboard) or activated the “Show Formulas” mode in Excel. When you do it, excel shows the formulas instead of their results.
Why are my formulas not showing up as text in Excel?
Click the Formulas tab. In the Formula Auditing group, click on Show Formulas. The keyboard shortcut to enable/disable showing formulas as text options is Control + `. In most cases, this should fix the problem and your formulas should show the result and not show up as text itself .
While we were writing we ran into the query “How to fix Excel treats formula as text instead of evaluating?”.
Some have found that When you set the cell formatting to “Text”, Excel treats the formula as text and shows it instead of evaluating it. To fix this error, just select the cell, set its formatting to “General”. Now edit the formula and press enter. (Alternatively you can press F2 and then Enter after setting format to General).
As suggested by its name, FORMULATEXT function returns a formula as a text string from a specified reference. To apply FORMULATEXT function, you simply have to put a cell reference into it. In the above example, the formula of Cell B5 is displayed in Cell D5.
Why are formulas showing as formulas in Excel?
The next reason why formulas are shown as formulas: You may have set the cell formatting to “Text ” and then typed the formula in it. When you set the cell formatting to “Text”, Excel treats the formula as text and shows it instead of evaluating it. To fix this error, just select the cell, set its formatting to “General”.
Here are some solutions to fix the issue:
Solution 1 – Disable Show Formulas. If only formula shows in Excel not result, check if you have accidentally or intentionally enabled ‘show formula’ feature of Excel. Another possible reason that only formula shows in Excel not result could be that the cell format is set to text. There is an “automatic calculation” feature in Excel, which tells Excel to do calculations automatically or manually. There is a proper way to tell Excel that your text is a formula. When you use a number in the formula, make sure you don’t enter any decimal separator or currency sign, e., and g., and $, etc.
Select the formula cells range. Now go to the formula tab and click on the Show Formulas option. Once you click on that option, excel starts to show the formula instead of the formula results. Shortcut to show formula in excel is Ctrl + `.
Instead of applying calculations and then showing results, this feature displays the actual text written by you. You can use the ‘Show Formulas’ feature to quickly view all formulas, but if you are not aware of this feature, and enabled it accidentally, it can be a headache.
This is what my research found. Therefore, if you enter a formula that links one cell to a cell formatted as text, the cell with the formula is also formatted as text. To display the calculated value rather than the formula, you must change the format of the cell containing the formula and re-enter the formula.
Why do I see a formula instead of a result?
There are two main reasons you might see a formula instead of a result: I’ll walk through each case with some examples. Excel has a feature called Show Formulas that toggles the display of formula results and actual formulas.
Why do we need to edit the formula in Excel?
The reason for editing the formula is that formatting the cell to General will not have any impact on the cell’s existing contents. Similarly, if you already had the result of your formula and later the cell is formatted to Text, it will not change to the formula in text.