A quick help needed with Excel, please..

I am not able to add a value.. like " -70 mV ", into a cell, in excel (2007)... the moment, I enter that or similar entries, an error pops up saying there is something wrong with the 'formula'... I remember seeing similar error long back, but I forgot what to do... I remember vaguely that I have to set excel to accept whatever is being entered into a cell, without excel interpreting it as some formula..

Can someone please enlighten me?

thanks a lot, cheers...

 

You need to precede the statement with an apostrophe:
'-70 mV

After leaving the cell, the apostrophe will disappear, but will remain visible in the text/formula bar above the worksheet.

 

That. The other way to do it is to change the cell format to text, which is handier if you're entering an entire column of data like that.

 

Thanks, this I didn't know.

Thank you This was what I was looking for... and I remember I'd done this long back!!

+rep to both of you.

Cheers..

 

You're welcome. The apostrophe tip is especially helpful when you're trying to display insignificant zeroes, such as 0001, and other things that would normally disappear after being typed.

Thanks for the rep!

 

Excel interprets everything it can. Which is REALLY freakin' annoying. Can you tell I like Excel?

 

Thanks again.. I wasn't aware of the apostrophe tip Its quiet useful and handy, I must say... I've been using this after seeing your post. Thanks.

@ Pita - I agree ... excel does have a way of interpreting everything in the way it wants!! but I like Excel though..

 

excel rocks...greatest program ever devised.

took a systems analyst class one time and there were a variety of major projects we had to do and the way people were using excel to accomplish goals were pretty stunning.

I consider myself an excel power user, but some of these people just blew me away. A guy who was working on his masters and worked for the local county road commission took a data dump from one of those traffic counters you see on the side of the road (box with a tube laying across the road) and fed the data into an excel spreadsheet and then built an animation into the sheet that actually showed the cars in realtime (or speed up) for a given day of traffic, and ran all kinds of statistical data through it.

I believe I actually gave him a standing ovation at the end of his presentation.

Another guy created a church program that collected data from spreadsheets all over the church office and collected it into one for the Pastor's desk so he didn't have to open a dozen spreadsheets each week.

I was running a fantasy hockey league at the time and had my spreadsheet go out on the internet and scrap webpages for stats, score the teams, create the standings and measure hot and cold streaks, etc..

Excel is so freaking cool....