Help! My Worksheet’s Excel formulas showing up as text!

If you suddenly have Excel formulas showing up as text in your Excel worksheet instead of the results of the formulas, there are a couple of common causes. If you fall into one of these buckets it’s a quick fix to get back to normal.

Situation 1: You have formula viewing toggled on

The easiest thing to try is to toggle the formula view off. You can do this by pressing the CTRL key at the same time as the “`” key. That’s the backwards single quote key (in the upper left corner of my keyboard along with the tilde (“~”) character.

CTRL `

Pressing CTRL+` repeatedly will toggle the formula viewing on/off.

Situation 2: You have cells formatted as Text

You may also have some cells formatted as Text instead of General.

To change the cell formatting, do the following.

1. Highlight the cells that have the problem.
2. Next, go to the Home tab and find the Number group on the ribbon.
3. In the drop-down list in the Number group select General.
4. Now either edit the formula (click in the formula editing bar and press Enter) or press F2 and then Enter from the cell.

Hopefully one of these simple fixes restores the view you had before.

There you go.

Here are some related posts:

How to change the case of your text in Excel How to enter multiple lines of text inside a single cell in Excel How to Collect Excel User Input and Return to Formulas How to convert text to number values in Excel Keep your row and column headings visible as you scroll in Excel