Displaying Formulas in a Worksheet

AS YOU KNOW, FORMULAS DO NOT normally display in the worksheet. Instead, the results of formulas appear in the result cells. If you click a result cell, the formula appears in the Formula bar—but that means in order to check a formula, you have to first find and then click its result cell and look in the Formula bar. A rather tedious process, especially if your worksheet has a lot of formulas.

Luckily, Excel allows you to display formulas instead of results when needed. With formulas displayed, it’s easier to double-check each one to ensure that it was entered correctly, which is particularly helpful when the formulas in your worksheet are long or complex.

Displaying formulas in a worksheet is an all-or-nothing thing, which means that once you display formulas, they remain displayed in that worksheet until you turn the feature off. By the way, this is a worksheet-level feature, so if you want to display formulas in all the worksheets in a workbook, you need to repeat these steps for each worksheet.

Follow these steps to display formulas:

1.	Change to the worksheet containing the formulas you want to display. To change from one worksheet to another, click the worksheet’s tab, located along the bottom of the Excel window.
2.	Click the Formulas tab.
3.	Click the Show Formulas button, located in the Formula Auditing group. Cells are automatically expanded to display formulas fully, as shown in Figure 4-1. Figure 4-1. One way to check formulas is to display them in the worksheet. [View full size image]

As a reminder, while you are poking around the worksheet checking formulas, keep in mind that if you click a result cell, the cells referred to in that formula are highlighted by colored boxes that match the same cell addresses in the worksheet (see Figure 4-1). Remember as well that you can drag a colored box and drop it on a new cell to change a cell reference used in the formula.

To hide formulas once again, click the Show Formulas button on the Format tab to turn it off.